Peril

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Can you be here in an hour?”

  “All right.”

  Tony heard a quiet sigh from the other side, waited for more, and when none came, gently returned the phone to its place.

  CARUSO

  Caruso heard the soft click as Tony Labriola returned the phone to its cradle. He had lied and lied, but the strange part was that he wasn’t sure why he’d lied, save that in the world he knew, the truth was never a good idea.

  Fuck, he thought as he hung up the phone. Then he posed the question starkly, Where the hell is Eddie Sullivan? When no answer immediately presented itself, he rose and walked out of the cramped office he maintained in the basement of the Caldwell Hotel, past the usual losers, who hung like old coats in the corridor, and into the brisk autumn air.

  The spitting rain that had drenched the city the night before had finally relented, but the cloudless blue sky gave Caruso no relief. Instead, he sensed that far away a little bulletlike particle had suddenly assumed a trajectory that would inevitably send it crashing directly between his eyes. Eddie Sullivan was missing, and he could be missing only because something had happened to him, something really bad.

  But what?

  Caruso stared into the empty blue and considered possibilities that were as far beyond him as the infinite spaces that dwarfed him from above.

  Labriola.

  That was the obvious answer. Somehow, the Old Man had gotten wind that Eddie was working for Tony, and so, to flex his muscle, show that pussy-whipped son of his that he meant business, he’d done something—snatched, beaten up, murdered, any or all of the above?—poor, stupid Eddie Sullivan.

  This was certainly possible, Caruso reasoned, because Labriola was really lathered up about something, and when he was that way, he was capable of anything. But if you added reason to the brew, even the small amount that battled to maintain itself within whatever storm was currently blowing in Labriola’s mind, then doing something bad to Eddie made no real sense.

  Caruso leaned against the side of the building and ticked off the reasons why it was pointless to hurt Eddie Sullivan.

  First off, you didn’t need to. A stiff warning would be enough. At most, a slap, a punch in the stomach. Eddie would have inevitably reported such crude disciplinary action to Tony, and in response Tony would have immediately pulled Eddie out of the game.

  Second, why should Mr. Labriola give a shit what Eddie did? Eddie was just a guy who worked for Tony. Why should Labriola worry if Eddie trailed Batman until he found Tony’s wife? As long as she was found, it didn’t matter who found her, right? Okay, so forget Labriola. Chances were he had nothing to do with whatever had happened to Eddie Sullivan.

  Which left Batman.

  The more Caruso considered the matter, the more it seemed to him that if Eddie had come to harm, it was Batman who’d done it to him. He was a secretive guy, after all. Morty Dodge had made that clear. A guy so secretive he’d refused to meet Labriola. He won’t show. Those were Morty’s words. Now, Eddie Sullivan was no pro at tailing a guy, so suppose he burned his cover, which he probably did. What would a secretive, probably nutty guy like Batman do in a situation like that? The answer, given Morty’s sinister mutterings, was that he might do anything. Which meant that Eddie Sullivan might very well be dead.

  The more Caruso pondered this explanation, the more it hardened in his mind. At first, it was a distinct possibility. Seconds later it was a definite probability. Before a minute passed, Eddie Sullivan was without doubt sleeping with the fishes.

  This was a serious conclusion, and now Caruso’s mind shifted to its equally grave implications. Within a few days he had gone from a guy hiring another guy to find a broad to a guy who’d hired a guy who’d killed a second guy who was trailing the guy who was trailing the broad. Caruso’s mind dipped and whirled as he tried to nail down what, from a legal standpoint, he had done.

  One thing was sure. His ass was in a crack, and the guy who’d put it there was Batman. The question was how to get back out of it. The answer seemed obvious, and the beauty was that he longed to do it anyway. The answer was to whack Batman, the murdering, psychotic bastard.

  For a moment he imagined doing just that. He saw the silver-haired figure strolling down a midnight street, that fancy book in his hand, feeling all smart and safe and above everybody else, completely unaware of the figure who’d fallen in behind him, a little guy with a pencil-thin mustache who now moved closer and closer, pulling his neat little thirty-eight from his trouser pocket, waiting for just the right position to do a gorgeous job.

  Then, BAM!

  Caruso smiled with satisfaction as the rest of the film unspooled in delicious slow motion. Batman falling forward, knees buckling, that fancy book of his sliding across the gritty sidewalk and tumbling into the gutter wash, Batman now facedown, eyes open, staring, astonished that he’d actually been whacked, the snooty bastard, that his brains and his secrecy and having Morty Dodge as his personal gofer hadn’t protected him from that little cylinder of lead Caruso had sent hurtling into the back of his fucking head.

  There was only one word for it, Caruso thought as the movie came to its glittering end. Beautiful.

  MORTIMER

  He watched Dottie as she made his usual breakfast of bacon and eggs. She seemed to roll rather than to walk, a huge round ball of a woman draped in the same tattered housedress she’d worn for years. Or was it the same? Mortimer didn’t know. He didn’t know Dottie either, he realized suddenly, and now there would never be any time to discover who she was at the moment or had been all these years. The pain in his guts made it clear that they would not grow old together. He would not be with her during her final illness, and so there’d be no one beside her bed when she drew her last breath. How sad that seemed to him now that she would die alone, that after having given her so little, he would not be able to give her at least the comfort of his presence when the light dimmed and the room grew cold.

  They’d met someplace twenty-eight years before. A party of some kind, he recalled, probably having to do with a game or some other sporting event. He’d explained how the odds worked and she’d smiled and smiled and tried to look fascinated though he doubted that she’d given a rat’s ass about a single thing he’d said. How thick he must have been not to have known that she was only trying to make him feel comfortable, or like a big shot, or whatever way a homely girl thought she ought to make a guy feel so he’d take an interest. Still, it was sweet of her to have tried to make him feel good about himself, Mortimer thought. But then, she’d always been good to him, he supposed, never one to bitch all that much, never one to complain when he wasn’t around. Just a decent person, Dottie was, a woman with a big, kind heart. The salt of the earth, he told himself, his wife was the salt of the earth.

  “Dottie,” he said quietly.

  She didn’t turn from the counter. “Yeah.”

  “Dottie.”

  He heard the plaintive sound in his voice and knew that she’d heard it too, because she turned toward him slowly, a quizzical look in her eyes.

  He smiled quietly and patted his lap. “Come here.”

  She didn’t move but simply stared at him wonderingly, a slice of white bread in her hand, a pink plastic knife in the other. “I’m making lunch,” she said.

  “Come here,” he repeated.

  She came forward reluctantly, bringing the bread and knife with her, and sat down on his lap.

  “Dottie,” he repeated. He could feel her great weight on his legs, the vast round bulk of her, soft and doughy, like holding a huge sack of flour.

  “Dottie . . .” he began again, but the words stopped in his throat and he could only stare at her mutely, a strange sense of failure descending upon him as he admitted to himself that there was nothing he could do for her, nothing that would comfort or protect. It was too late. And so he simply patted her back softly and said, “Get up.”

  She looked at him oddly.

  “Get up,” he repeated, now remembe
ring the one person on earth he might still help in some way.

  “Morty, what’s the matter with you!” Dottie asked.

  Mortimer gave no answer, but merely strode into the bedroom, pulled out the top drawer of the bureau, and dug around in a tangle of socks until he found the pistol. “I gotta go,” he told Dottie as he came back out of the room.

  “You ain’t having lunch?”

  “No,” he said. He yanked on his coat and the old rumpled hat and fled out into the dreary corridor, then down the unpainted stairs, floor after floor, the stabbing pain in his abdomen increasing with each step until he burst out into the crisp autumn air, all but running now, dodging traffic as he crossed Eighty-sixth Street, then stopped dead and drew in a long, shaky breath, his gaze rising up the lightless windows of his building until it reached the terrace of his apartment, where he saw Dottie standing in her old faded housedress, peering down, searching for him in the crowd.

  He fled into a nearby shop, and from that vantage point watched his wife give up the search and shrink back into the apartment, where he imagined her at the kitchen counter again, smearing mayonnaise on a piece of white bread.

  Even now he wasn’t sure what he’d wanted to say to her as she sat on his lap. Dottie, you know I love you, right? No, that wasn’t it, because he didn’t really, and never had. Dottie, I got some bad news. That couldn’t have been it, because he wasn’t at all sure she would find the news of his impending death all that difficult to take.

  Then suddenly he knew what he’d wanted to say: Dottie, is there anything I can do . . . That was what he’d intended to ask her. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you? A dumb question, he thought now, which was why the answer had come to him so quickly, No, asshole, there’s not a damn thing you can do for her.

  The pistol sagged down in his jacket pocket, and as he felt its weight he thought again of Abe. Abe had done him the only favor that mattered to him now. He said he would hold on to the fifteen grand and give it to Dottie when the time came. He was a friend, Abe, and even though fifteen grand was nothing, a lousy year’s rent, still when he’d asked Abe to hold on to it, Abe had agreed without the slightest hesitation. He curled his fingers around the handle of the pistol. Okay, then, he thought, one good turn deserves another.

  MRS. DAROCCA

  She had never learned to drive, and so she walked now, moving her heavy body through the old neighborhood as if it were a stone pushed by the lithesome young girl she’d once been.

  She walked past Our Lady of Fatima Parochial School and remembered Sister Amelia’s shocked response, the accusatory gaze of Father Santori the day he’d escorted her through the iron gate and on to the hard concrete walkway, grasped her shoulder, turned her brusquely, and sent her home with a cold final word, I’ll be speaking to your mother.

  She walked past the row house her longshoreman father had finally managed to buy and recalled the mist in her mother’s eyes when the old priest left her house later that same afternoon and she came up the stairs to her prodigal daughter’s room and told her flatly that she’d shamed the family, This will break your father’s heart, Celia.

  She walked past the little park where she’d met Frankie DaRocca and told him everything in a burst of anguished confession, recalling the soft touch of his hand on hers, I’ll marry you, CeeCee, past the stone church where he’d made good on that promise, past Frankie’s house, where she’d lived with Frankie and his widowed mother for the first five years, past the hospital where her son had been born, taking the name DaRocca, just as she had taken it seven months before.

  In the space of a few blocks she passed all the remaining architecture of her youth, walking like the condemned young girl she’d been so many years before, the old landmarks of her neighborhood still wreathed in hostility and disappointment so that she picked up her pace as she moved through the last of them, rushing like someone running a gauntlet, her white orthopedic shoes padding ever more rapidly against the concrete sidewalk until she stopped before the house she sought, so much bigger than the rest, noticed the big blue Lincoln in its gated driveway, and so knew that he was home.

  She had never been in Leonardo’s house, and as far as she knew neither of his parents had ever known about her. They’d behaved like the aristocrats Leonardo’s father had always claimed they came from, American only in that they rode in fancy cars rather than in fancy carriages. They’d had high hopes for their only son, and early on Leonardo had appeared perfectly suited to fulfill them, a tall, handsome boy with jet-black hair who’d been the pride of Our Lady of Fatima’s track team, a boy on the way to some big school, maybe even Notre Dame. How could she ever have expected him to throw all that away over some dumb Sicilian peasant girl pregnant with a little boy whose small dead body she could still see cradled in Frankie DaRocca’s slender teenage arms.

  She made her way up the stairs, surprised that one of Leonardo’s thugs hadn’t suddenly appeared to block her way. She knew he’d gone in that direction, gotten in trouble with the law, gone to jail, then come out again to become some kind of small-time gangster, a downward and disreputable course that must have humiliated and enraged Leonardo’s parents. She’d heard that they’d disowned him after he was nabbed in a stolen car ring, but she’d heard only scant news since then. Clearly he’d inherited the family home, or perhaps bought it after his parents’ death. It was the sort of thing she could see him doing just to get even with them, buying back the house of his boyhood with the dirty money his parents would never have taken. He was like that, Leonardo, a guy in whom hurt quickly turned to anger. She’d seen that early on, and so had never told him about the little boy he’d fathered on a rainy night in a Queens parking lot, and who now lay still and dead in the DaRocca family plot.

  The door opened and he stood in the shadowy light of the foyer, an old man in a floral shirt and baggy pants, the handsome face ravaged by time or worry, or just the corrosive things she knew he’d done. His hair was white and thick, but beneath its silver crown the young man she’d once known had entirely run to ground. Deep lines ran in jagged gullies down the sides of his face and spread out from his eyes, creased his forehead and gave his face the look of desert soil badly raked.

  “You want something?” he barked.

  “It’s CeeCee,” she told him. “CeeCee Maganara.”

  She’d fixed herself up slightly, applied a little rouge and lipstick, worn the dress she’d bought for Della’s wedding and which, though tight, still showed her figure to good advantage. Now she realized that these considerations meant nothing, her little allurements added in vain. There was no glimmer of romantic appreciation left in Leonardo Labriola, and so she knew that what little power she thought she might have had over him had long ago dropped away.

  He blinked dully, his eyes on her eyes, wandering nowhere, so that Celia knew that she was as unrecognizable to him as the little boy he’d sired, no less a foreign, unknown, crumbling thing. And yet he had loved her once, hadn’t he? He had said he did, and she had believed it. He had whispered it in her ear softly, gently, and through all the years that had passed since then, she had harbored the belief that it had been true. But now a wholly different truth emerged, the terrible nature of her gullibility, the lie she’d swallowed and then nurtured through the years, telling herself that once she’d been loved by a smart boy, a handsome boy, a boy with class, with a future, a boy on his way to college, that once, just once, she’d possessed the looks and manner of one who could summon the love of such a person. She had come in the hope of reluming that memory in the man who stood before her. Now she realized that no such possibility existed, or had ever existed, that she was merely one of many others he’d known briefly, then discarded.

  “When we were . . .” she began, then stopped since there was no point in appealing to the past, the night in the car, the talk of love. All of that was dead. And so she said, “My daughter lives across the street from your son. That’s what I got to talk to you about, Leonardo.”<
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  The way she’d used his first name appeared to drop a stone in the deep well of his consciousness, release a few small ripples into his mind. “What’d you call me?”

  “Leonardo,” Celia answered. “I called you that in high school.”

  Labriola’s eyes squeezed together but without recognition.

  “The thing is, I want you to leave my daughter alone,” Celia said.

  “You what?”

  “You came to her house,” Celia said, but without the boldness she’d hoped to show him. Instead, she felt a rising fear she met the only way she knew how, which was to harden and grow more bold. “You threatened her. You came to her house and threatened her.”

  Labriola leveled a lethal stare in Celia’s direction and stepped out onto the porch. “What I do is none of your fucking business.”

  She could see the full depth of what he had become, the serpent that lay coiled within him. She felt like a small brown sparrow, he the hawk circling overhead. Her only choice was to act like a sparrow, charge the hawk as if it were the same size, inflate herself with courage. “Just leave my daughter alone,” she snapped back at him.

  Labriola stepped toward her, and she felt the force of all the violence he’d known. It came at her like a wind, dry and brutal, and she lifted her hand as if against a blow.

  “Don’t touch me,” she blurted out.

  Labriola seemed to expand on a breath of hatred, grow immensely large in his fearful rage and spite. “You tell that daughter of yours she better keep her fucking mouth shut.”

  Celia stumbled backward as Labriola pressed forward relentlessly.

  “That bitch is going to pay,” Labriola screamed. “That fucking bitch that left Tony.”

  She turned and headed down the stairs, moving far more quickly than she’d have thought possible, her arthritic limbs now scared into obedience, lubricating her arid joints with panic’s slithery oil.

  “And if anybody gets between me and that worthless cunt, they’re going to pay too,” Labriola bellowed.