“Why are you doing this?” Frankie calmly asks again.
Why is he doing this? He’s spinning the roulette wheel, rolling the dice, dealing his hand. One small fuckup, one careless move, and he loses. They both lose. But it’s not as if he has a choice. Free will has nothing to do with it.
“You know why I’m doing it.”
“This isn’t what she meant. This isn’t what she would have wanted.”
“Then I’m doing it because I want to. Just like you would do it for me. I won’t ever let anyone hurt you. Never. So go upstairs and throw all his clothes into trash bags. Don’t leave anything, not even a sock.”
The priest arrives at the appointed hour, promptly as always, tonight’s entrée in hand. This week it’s stuffed shells in red gravy, forty minutes at 350 degrees, lovingly prepared by one of the women of the parish, all of whom worry that Father is wasting away to skin and bones. He’s brought a bottle of Gavi and Jewish apple cake, Frankie’s favorite, made from scratch by another member of his flock.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” Michael whispers in his brother’s ear as Jack busies himself in the kitchen.
Frankie reminds him of his own words.
Business as usual. Nothing out of the ordinary. Don’t raise any suspicion.
Michael hadn’t known about his brother and his friend’s Friday night tradition.
“He eats here every week. What did you want me to tell him?”
If Michael were to paint a portrait of a pedophile, it would look exactly like Jack Centafore—eyes set too close together, wispy strands of hair, and a pockmarked, sallow complexion. He really ought to cut the poor guy some slack. It’s unkind to say he looks like a predator. What does a child molester look like anyway? He’s prosecuted some who could pass as innocent choirboys and others who seemed as jolly as Santa Claus. It isn’t the priest’s fault he was born ugly. It’s not a crime. It doesn’t make him a bad person. But Michael doesn’t like him, never has. The sound of his voice grates; his condescending words infuriate.
“Don’t you have anything green in the house?” the priest shouts, rooting in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator. “I hope neither of you is dying for a salad. It’s going to be a Spartan feast tonight,” Jack says, uncorking the Gavi and pouring three generous glasses.
He seems oblivious to the tension in the room, unaware of the laundry list of forbidden topics of conversation this evening. Michael insisted Frankie isn’t to mention the situation in Pittsburgh. Jack would question why they were sitting in Philadelphia, casually drinking wine, when their place is at their dying sister’s bedside. And Mariano, of course. Jack knows he’s gone and the locks have been changed. Frankie isn’t to say anything more and let Michael handle it if the priest brings up the subject. The official reason for Michael’s unexpected overnight visit is a seven a.m. appointment at the dealership. Frankie knows nothing about cars and Michael doesn’t want to see him fleeced. Michael’s uncomfortable using multiple alibis. One story for his family and his office who think he and his brother are attending a bedside vigil three hundred miles west. Another for the priest and the shampoo girl and a fully booked schedule of customers who believe there’s nothing out of the ordinary. It worries him. Simplicity is the key to escaping detection.
“I thought your car was inspected last month, Frankie?” Jack asks as they take their places at the table.
“It’s not an inspection,” Michael corrects him. “It needs a realignment and I want to get an estimate on bodywork to clean up all those little dinks on the chassis. I keep telling him to take a monthly lease on a garage space instead of insisting on parking on the fucking street.”
“I would have thought you’d be uptown tonight, Michael. Rumor has it your boy is making an appearance at the Obama rally in Independence Park.”
“Danny? At a rally?” Michael asks, befuddled by the remark.
Jack throws back his head for a good, long, braying mule laugh.
“Bruce. The Boss. Springsteen. He’s endorsed Obama.”
It feels like it was another lifetime that he was sitting on a bench, reading about Bruce’s announcement while waiting for the train. Jack opens a second bottle of wine, a red this time. Michael is grateful to cede the floor to him. The priest is a Democrat, despite the party’s insistence life doesn’t begin at conception, and thinks Hillary would make a fine president. But he’s suffering from Clinton fatigue and he has to admit the idea of electing the first black president is exciting.
“It’s the first time I could be voting for a president younger than myself. I’m starting to feel old. Who are you voting for, Michael?”
“Whoever my wife tells me to vote for. The price of domestic tranquility.”
The evening passes uneventfully. Jack attributes Frankie’s quietness to his grieving for the old priest.
“I’m worried,” he confides in Michael when Frankie excuses himself to visit the bathroom. “Maybe he should talk to someone. Maybe he should be on medication.”
Michael rises to clear the dessert plates, thinking the priest will take his leave. But instead Jack brings a bottle of Frangelico to the table, yet another Friday night tradition Michael’s learning about for the first time. He proposes a toast and finally announces it’s time he should be in bed. When Michael returns upstairs after letting him out, Frankie is sitting on the sofa, the remote in his hand. Michael asks to watch the last few innings of a game being played in central time. Michael doesn’t make it through the top of the eighth and when he awakes hours later a man is doing a sales pitch for a miracle appliance. His head is in his sleeping brother’s lap and he closes his eyes and dozes off again, too exhausted to dream.
APRIL 19, 2008
Marianne Scavetti says she’ll understand if Frankie says no. She’d done all she could do to talk her daughter out of such an expensive folly, but Amber had insisted that she would allow no one but Tocci of Tocci & Guiliano’s, a perennial Best of Philly winner and the stylist of choice for all the female local newscasters, to cut her hair for the biggest day of her life. That snooty bastard had charged two hundred fifty dollars to spend less than five minutes with the poor girl before turning the scissors over to one of his many assistants, who may as well have chopped her hair with lawn clippers. She left the shop sobbing and hysterical and now her mother is begging Frankie to do damage control. Please, Frankie. Puh . . . leeze. Her father will pick you up and take you back. He’s known Marianne since elementary school and this is the first time he’s heard her cry. Michael encourages him to say yes. Go, go. We can’t leave until dark. It will calm you down if you have something to do with your hands.
“What time is the wedding?”
“Seven.”
“I’ll have Connie cancel my last appointment. Have him pick me up at four.”
All brides are beautiful, but Amber Scavetti needs a bit of magic and a lot of heavy labor. He assures her a bride wearing a size-fourteen gown can still be stunning. Her mother had objected to her choice of a wedding dress, worried too much unsightly back fat would be exposed. Frankie insists the strapless gown is an inspired choice that will show off her daughter’s flawless milky skin, her best feature. He suggests they try a classic ballet chignon, solving the problem of the naturally frizzy texture of her hair and leaving nothing to distract the eye from the sensuous line of her long neck and shoulders. Marianne is skeptical, offering other suggestions for the best way to tame her daughter’s unruly mane.
“Just shut up, Ma. One more word and I’m locking you out of the room,” the girl threatens. “Frankie knows what he’s doing.”
It feels good, having a task at hand, a challenge, something to take his mind off the gruesome chore that awaits. The only thing that matters at this moment is that, in a few hours, Amber will be walking down the aisle, basking in the murmurs of approval, a storybook bride, Odette from Swan Lake, far lovelier than anyone could have expected.
Frankie’s car is still in the custody of the Upper Me
rion Township police, so Michael will need to put his BMW sedan into service as an improvised hearse to transport the body to its final resting place. It’s probably for the best as no one is going to issue a warrant to search a vehicle registered to the Chief Deputy District Attorney of Delaware County. He’s outside Home Depot loading cinder blocks and chain link into the trunk when Kit calls to see how he and Frankie are holding up and to offer her support. He assures her nothing has changed.
“That pig stepson is acting out. He thinks I’m the devil who escaped from the bowels of hell. I’ve got it under control. You’ve got enough to worry about with Eleanor’s big day.”
“Miss P’s going to miss you tomorrow.”
“Please. She hates my guts.”
“Do you think that matters? All she’ll remember is you weren’t there to pay proper homage.”
For the first time in his life there’s nothing he’d rather be doing than spending time with Eleanor Peterson. Kit says she has a thousand little details to look after before the party. He wishes her luck and drives to his next stop, Target, to buy vinyl shower curtains and an expandable wardrobe bag. He tears the cash receipts for his afternoon purchases into tiny pieces that he tosses to the wind.
Come nightfall, Michael plans to pull his car onto Carpenter Street and carefully back down the side alley that leads to the rear entrance to the house. It will be a tight fit and he’ll be lucky to escape with a few minor scratches. He’d had the foresight to line the trunk with one of the shower curtains before leaving the Target parking lot. They’ll quickly load the body and head for the interstate. They should arrive in Virginia in four hours, with hours of darkness ahead to carry out their scheme.
Neither Frankie nor Michael has an appetite and they ought to avoid spending the next few hours getting jacked on caffeine. Frankie says he wants to attend the five o’clock vigil Mass, and Michael, shocking himself, agrees to accompany him. It can’t hurt to light a candle; Jesus must sometimes listen to the prayers of apostates. The days are growing longer and the weather is pleasant for the short walk to the church. Familiar faces from Michael’s past greet the Gagliano brothers by name from their lawn chairs on the sidewalk. Only the most stubborn and contrary of the old guard remain rooted in the row houses where they’ve spent their lives. They insist they’ll have to be carried out feet first, ignoring the notices from the city of overdue property taxes and the pleas of their grown sons and daughters to follow them to Jersey and Delaware County.
Michael tries engaging his brother, commenting on the changing neighborhood, criticizing the greed of real estate developers and the surplus of flashy half-million-dollar town houses being built in this suddenly fashionable zip code. A century after prosperous immigrants used their new fortunes to build ornate Georgian grande dames like the building at Eighth and Carpenter, South Philadelphia—or at least its northernmost borders—is on the rise again, buoyed by the exorbitant mortgages of a new generation lured by the promise of ten-year real estate tax abatements and a city residence with a two-car garage.
“Didn’t you ever want to live somewhere else, Frankie?” Michael asks. It’s intended to be a rhetorical question and an answer isn’t expected.
Frankie stops dead in his tracks, seemingly spellbound by the idea.
“Could I really do that, Mikey?” he asks, no less awestruck than if his brother had suggested he pack up his belongings and take up residence on the moon.
The Mass feels endless. The young priest recently assigned by the archdiocese as Jack’s assistant pastor is a less-than-dynamic speaker and Frankie’s mind is elsewhere during his meandering sermon. His attempts at contrition feel hollow and forced. The truth is he doesn’t feel sorry or ashamed. In fact, he doesn’t feel anything but bewildered and terrified by the thought of being caught. A little boy two pews ahead is making a fuss, resisting his mother’s attempts to restrain him. Poor Cameron is no older than this kid. What’s going to happen to him? What chance does he have to grow up, live a decent life? Mariano had once been an innocent child, too, corrupted by the very people entrusted to protect him. It’s not Frankie’s fault that the boy ended up as an ice block about to be sunk to the floor of a tide pool. The die had been cast long before that fateful Valentine’s Day when their paths crossed in a storefront tacqueria. It was always meant to be this way. Mariano was never destined to live beyond the first blush of youth. Some people are just born unlucky.
“Frankie, muchas gracias for the cerveza!”
It had completely slipped Frankie’s mind that he’d generously donated three fifty-dollar bills to ensure there were enough kegs on tap to keep the Carpenter Street block party, Saturday, April nineteenth, rain or shine, from running dry. Christmas lights are strung between Eighth and Seventh Streets and speakers blare every possible style of party music, Jay-Z to G. Love to the Dead, from the open windows of the row houses. The karaoke machine is ready and waiting for the first performer to get lubricated enough to take the stage. Burgers and Italian sausages are sputtering on charcoal grills. A posse of young dads, rushing the season in cargo shorts and flip-flops, insist that Frankie and Michael join the neighborhood camaraderie and hoist plastic cups of PBR.
The residents of the 700 block are settling in for a long night. It will be midnight before a few patrol officers come around to amiably enforce the city noise ordinances. Even then a few of the revelers will malinger on their front stoops until two in the morning, the party not officially over until the last keg is dry. Michael and Frankie will be fortunate to be able to load the trunk before the approach of dawn.
The first performer is introduced by the evening’s amateur karaoke jockey. Michael cringes at the off-key rendition of “Don’t Stop Believing.” The song’s unfortunate association with Tony Soprano’s final moments makes him skittish, reminding him of the rapidly dwindling window of opportunity to dump the body tonight. Doing it in broad daylight is not an option.
An urban pioneer wearing a Boston Red Sox cap offers Michael another cup of beer and makes a pitch for him to join the neighborhood civic association. He doesn’t remember seeing Michael around before. Did he buy one of the old row houses, with small rooms the realtors describe as “cozy,” or did he splurge on the gabled and spacious new construction? The man and his wife opted for the older housing stock—well, it’s all they can afford on their salaries as bench researchers at one of the local medical schools—and now the rumors are flying that the assessment board is considering raising their real estate tax rates. The buyers getting the tax abatements are the ones who least need them. No offense, buddy, he grouses to Michael, assuming he’s one of the more prosperous recent arrivals contributing to the steady rise in median household income in the Ninth Street Market neighborhood. He only wishes he and his wife had the scratch to qualify for a six-hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage themselves.
Michael feigns interest in the conversation as he gazes at all the happy faces enjoying cold libations on a beautiful spring night. He doesn’t know any of them, though he definitely recognizes all of the types. They could be his neighbors in the Friendly Village of Wayne, mostly young achievers, a few empty nesters, professionals, educated and definitely of a liberal-minded bent. And here they are, living cheek-to-jowl with the likes of Vinnie’s widow. Maybe coexisting is a more apt description of the demographics. Michael knows which will be the winning side. The feisty old stalwarts with names ending in vowels will die off or finally be squeezed out by the rising property values, exiled to retirement villages or tiny apartments close to their children’s homes.
“How do you know Frankie?” the man asks. “We love him. He’s real South Philly. Authentic. A real fucking character.”
“He’s my brother,” Michael says acidly, walking away from his flustered interrogator.
Finally, he sees a familiar face, though it’s hardly a welcome sight. Jack Centafore and Frankie are engrossed in deep conversation.
“I didn’t expect to see you here tonight,” Jack comme
nts as Michael approaches.
“Kit and Danny are in New York, so I’m going to rewire the lighting in the salon tomorrow.”
“Let me know if you need any help.”
Michael’s relieved to hear the priest has only been soliciting a generous donation from Frankie to support the annual Procession of Saints.
“What say you come down and join your brother at the procession this year, Michael? Bring your boy. It will be fun. Pass on some of the old traditions.”
“My kid’s Episcopalian and wouldn’t know Saint Rocco from Luke Skywalker.”
“See what I mean? All the more reason to bring him.”
“We’ll see,” he says.
“I saw in the Inquirer that the court threw out the death sentence for one of the killers of that poor Carmine Torino. You know the Church is opposed to the death penalty, but I feel for his heartbroken parents. I’m praying they’ll find peace someday and accept that everything happens for a reason. That it’s all part of God’s plan.”
Michael refrains from asking the priest to spare him the sanctimonious platitudes. God has nothing to do with it. Men make their own plans. Just like he’s taken matters into his own hands, not relying on divine providence to rescue his brother from this fucking mess.
APRIL 20, 2008
This fucking interminable block party is more than a minor inconvenience, forcing Michael to deviate from his blueprint. He waits for the last drunken straggler to lock their front door and until every window facing Carpenter Street is dark, then brings the car around to load the body before sunrise. Frankie never flinches, doesn’t hesitate, as they lift Mariano from the freezer chest. They wrap him in one of the shower curtains, securing him with rope, and zip him into the wardrobe bag. Frankie slips, nearly losing his balance as they carry Mariano’s body up the basement steps and through the back door to the open trunk. It makes for a snug fit when Michael tosses in the two trash bags of Mariano’s clothes, but the lid closes without effort.
The Boys from Eighth and Carpenter Page 34
