by Norman Green
And rules? What rules? Here’s your guy, he’s coming to get you, you think he gives a shit about rules? You got maybe three seconds to decide what you’re gonna do . . .
Alessandra’s mother had eked out a lonely existence in the barren winter terrain of Victor Martillo’s world, but eventually she’d had enough and she checked herself out. After that, Al got nailed with an indeterminate sentence in the custody of her maternal aunt. The memory of her introduction to Magdalena’s labyrinth gave her a shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature.
Christ, she thought. TJ thinks I’m a terrorist, what the hell would he think of Mag?
About an hour and a half later it looked to Al like all the restaurant patrons were gone. Most of the police cruisers were gone as well. Costello’s parking lot was mostly empty. There was one group of cars parked down at the far end of the lot, Al figured they had to belong to the people who worked in the place. Some of them were leaving, too. The parking valet got into a Lincoln MKZ and started it up. The Lincoln wasn’t down at the end of the lot with the other employees’ cars, it was more toward the middle. You’re the guy parking the cars, Al thought, you can put your ride wherever you want . . . The Lincoln pulled out of the lot and turned up her street. Al slid back down, waited until the guy turned the corner at the end of the block, and then she started the Mitsubishi, pulled a U-turn, and followed the guy. She couldn’t have said what made her decide to do it, maybe she was just tired of sitting there freezing her nipples off, but she figured, if the hit team really did leave a car at Costello’s, if it wasn’t the Lincoln, the real one would still be there in the morning. A quick ride back down Knapp Street would confirm that.
It turned out that the Lincoln was pretty easy to follow. The guy jumped onto the Belt Parkway and followed it as it curled around Brooklyn’s south and west shores. The Mitsubishi started to warm up once they got onto the Belt and Al turned the heat up as high as it would go. After they passed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Belt turned into the Gowanus Expressway. She was genuinely surprised, though, when the guy got off at the Atlantic Avenue exit.
It was her street.
The bar, the one she lived over, was closed up tight, lights out, ghetto grates padlocked securely across the door and windows. She felt a momentary pang, for a second or two she had an intense desire to ditch the Mitsubishi and go upstairs to bed. Instead, though, she stayed behind the Lincoln. The guy followed Atlantic Ave. up and over the hill, past Brooklyn Corrections, eventually turned right on Smith Street. He pulled into a small fenced-in lot next to a Lebanese bakery and parked. Al stuck the Mitsubishi next to a fire hydrant and watched the guy yak to the lot attendant before heading off down Pacific. Al got out, stretched, then crossed over and watched as the guy entered an ancient brownstone halfway down Pacific. She walked down, took a picture of the front of the building with her cell phone, got another picture of the rear end of the Lincoln on her way back to the Mitsubishi.
When she got back she found an orange and white parking ticket flapping in the breeze under the Mitsubishi’s windshield wiper. Five fucking minutes, she thought, are you kidding me? I couldn’t have been gone longer than that. She left it where it was. Marty is gonna be seriously pissed off, she thought, when they trace this car back to his credit card . . . The ticket blew off as she passed Brooklyn Corrections.
Seven
It was after ten by the time Alessandra got out of the shower. Twenty minutes later she was dressed, but she still wasn’t ready to face the day. She stomped down the stairs, yanked hard to open the heavy door to the street, was greeted by a blast of cold air. She’d looked for her winter coat the night before but had not found it, and how you could lose something like that while moving from one tiny apartment to another was beyond her, but it was gone. When she passed the entrance to the bar she looked through the window. Beads of water ran down the inside of the glass. It looked warm in there, and the dim bar lights seemed much more civilized than the harsh morning sun. She turned and went in.
Her landlady was behind the bar. There was one patron, he sat at a table and stabbed halfheartedly at his breakfast with a fork. “Good morning, Mrs. Taylor,” Al said. “Is that coffee I smell?”
“It certainly is,” Mrs. Taylor replied in her nicotine-stained baritone. “Have a seat.”
It came in a thick white china mug with a blue stripe around the top. Al wrapped her hands around it, felt the heat seep into her, held it to her face, and drank in the smell before she finally took a sip. “God, that’s good,” she said. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” Mrs. Taylor said. “Rough night?”
Al nodded. “Yeah, sort of. I had to work late. Thought I was gonna freeze myself to death.”
“What is it that you do?” Mrs. Taylor said. “I forgot to ask, before.”
“I work for a security company,” Al told her.
“You mean, like a guard at a bank?”
“No. Nothing as nice as that. When someone’s getting divorced, they hire a lawyer. If the lawyer is smart, he hires us, or someone like us. We go find out who the husband is sleeping with and where he hides the money.”
Mrs. Taylor laughed. “But sometimes it’s the wife, right? It can’t always be the guy.”
“Can’t always be the guy,” Al agreed. “Gotta be some of us, too, else who would all the guys be sleeping with? Each other, maybe, but it seems like I always get to follow the guy.”
“And are they always rats?”
“Ah, well, you know. I probably don’t get to see a representative sample.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Taylor said. “So they are always rats.”
Al shrugged. “I suppose you could look at it that way. I try not to judge, you know what I mean? Because who knows what their wives were putting them through. You live with some ice goddess for ten or twenty years, maybe when you finally decide to break out it’s only right that you should go a little crazy. So I just try to do my job. If I had to try and figure out who was right and who was wrong I’d be screwed.” She looked at the older woman. “Are you married?”
“Mm-hmm. Four times.”
“Wow. No kidding.”
“What could I tell you?” Mrs. Taylor said. “I like men. I enjoy their company, always did. And I never wanted to live alone, even though that’s what I’m doing now.”
“Yeah? You finally give up looking for a good one?”
“Nah. Not really. Number four has Alzheimer’s.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for. He was very good, and for a long time.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice rattled softly down in her throat. “He doesn’t really recognize me anymore, so I try to hang on to what we used to have. He was a good man.”
“You go to see him often?”
“I used to,” she said. “It was awful at first. I mean, we went through four years of misery before I finally had to put him in the Veterans’, you know, and when he got there he was very angry, he couldn’t understand what he was doing there. He’d ask me a million times when we were going home, and no matter what I told him he’d forget and ask me again about two minutes later. It was tough. Then the disease took all that away from him. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. Better for him, worse for me, I suppose. He’s lost now, but he’s happy, and he’s very sweet. I think that was what he really was all along, and the disease finally stripped everything else away.”
“That must be some consolation,” Al said.
“Not as much as you’d think,” Mrs. Taylor said. “The last time I went to see him, one of the little old ladies in there was going down on him.”
“Yikes! What did you do?”
Mrs. Taylor shrugged. “What could I do? He don’t know who I am, I doubt he knows if he was ever married or anything. She probably don’t remember who she is, neither. So I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and I closed the door and left them to it.”
“Jesus. I don’t know if I could manage that.”
“Yeah, maybe it would.”
“You must have someone,” Mrs. Taylor said. “With a behind like you got? Don’t tell me there’s nobody after it.”
Al nodded. “I been seeing this guy.” She hesitated, wondered how much she really wanted to say, but Mrs. Taylor had told her about her husband’s absentminded hummer, and that had to sting. “Maybe my job ruined things for me. Because I can’t believe, you know . . .” She shook her head. “Maybe that’s it. I can’t believe. Maybe that’s all it is.”
“No way to live,” Mrs. Taylor said, nodding. “Going around half pissed-off all the time, wondering if he’s jumping the fence. But you know, honey, you can’t tar ’em all with the same brush. What’s he do?”
“He’s a musician.”
Mrs. Taylor laughed then. “Oh, shit. Forget everything I just said.”
Al had to laugh with her. “You’re not helping very much,” she said. “One of yours a musician?”
Mrs. Taylor shook her head. “Actor,” she said. “Number two. Same breed of cat, though.”
“Yeah? Was he anybody I’d recognize?”
“Only if you liked daytime soaps.” Mrs. Taylor eyed her. “Back when you were about five, maybe. Then you might remember him as Dr. Reilly, the heartthrob surgeon.”
“No. Sorry.”
“No matter. He was a nice enough guy, and great fun to be with. Very insecure, though. Spent half his time trying to convince himself that he was a talented thespian and not just one lucky son of a bricklayer who happened to have a good chin and a nice smile. And I think he tried his best to be a good husband in his own way, but when he quit acting and started to direct instead, he couldn’t help himself. All these actresses, you know, all these perfect little tramps . . . And I wasn’t perfect no more, not by then. So . . . But I didn’t have to hire you guys to catch him, I did that myself.”
“Men,” Al said. “But you know what? I’m feeling you.”
“Well, coffee’s on the house. Good luck with yours.” Mrs. Taylor started laughing, couldn’t stop.
“What’s funny?”
“At the Veterans’,” Mrs. Taylor said, shaking her head, “that little old lady. She had Myron’s balls in one hand and her teeth in the other.”
Al finished her coffee, left two bucks on the bar.
Al called Sarah Waters while she sat in the Mitsubishi and waited for it to warm up. “Hey, killer,” she said. “How you feeling this morning?”
“Better,” Sarah said. “I’m worried sick about Frank, but I’m better. Starting to think a little clearer.”
“Oh really? How can you tell?”
“Well, I found Jake West, for one thing. And I’m having second thoughts about us going to the police just yet.”
“Yeah? Cold feet?”
“No. Well, I don’t think that’s it. It just occurred to me that if we talk now, they’re going to assume that it was Frank shot that guy, and they’ll go stomping around trying to pin it on him.”
“What if it really was him?”
“I can’t believe he would do something like that. I mean, he can be ignorant, and crude, he can even be mean sometimes, but I can’t see him ever killing anybody, not for any reason. How about this, how about we find Frank ourselves, and we get it from him? Then we can decide what to do. If he really did it, I’ll testify against him myself.”
“What if the cops come looking for us in the meantime?”
“Well, they might,” Sarah said. “But the more I think about it, the less likely it seems. I mean, Costello’s? In Brooklyn? You kidding me? Who’s gonna say anything?”
“That was my initial reaction,” Al said, “but I assumed that it was just my lack of moral fiber showing itself. I tell you what, I’ll meet you at the office, you can give me what you came up with on Frank and I’ll see if I can turn him up.”
“You don’t think that I . . .”
“No. Suppose he sees you coming? He doesn’t know me. Besides, somebody’s got to take care of the paying customers, else we’ll both end up in your mother’s basement. Speaking of paying customers, how’d you find this Jake character so quick?”
“Well,” Sarah said, “you can get a MasterCard from any bank in the country, but there’s only one American Express.”
“You’re kidding me. You hacked American Express’s database?”
“No,” Sarah said. “What happened, he changed his name a few years ago, from Jake West to John A. Smits, and he moved upstate, but he didn’t pay off all of his bills first and American Express hired a collector to find him and get their money back. The way it works, the guy buys the receivable and then what he collects is his. So he doesn’t find Jake, but three months later AmEx calls him up and says, ‘Never mind, he paid up,’ but now the collector is hot because he’s got time and money into this. So he says to AmEx, give me the guy’s name, at least that way I can cover my costs by squeezing him for some of the other credit cards he walked away from, so that’s what they did. I mean, they’re not supposed to, but the collector had a rabbi inside AmEx and the guy took care of him.”
“How’d you get him to give you all this?”
“I was lucky, I was posing as a collection agency myself. The guy is still steamed because Jake cleaned up all of his old bills and the guy never got any money out of the deal. You know how it is, you stiff somebody, they never forget you.”
“So where is Jake now?”
“J. Austin Smits, Woodstock, New York,” Sarah said.
“How about that? You tell Mrs. West about him yet?”
“Noooo . . .”
“Why not?”
“I got a funny feeling.”
“Yeah? About what?”
“You coming in? I’ll show you when you get here.”
Whatever, Al thought. Mrs. West was Sarah’s customer, so she figured Sarah could make the call. “Okay. Be a couple hours, though, while I still got the car I’m gonna take a ride out to Greenpoint. If we’re gonna hold off going to the cops about Frank, I’m gonna have to get TJ on board.”
“Wait a minute,” Sarah said. “No nookie during working hours.”
Al wondered if she was blushing, because that’s exactly what she had been thinking. She checked her face in the rearview mirror.
“Oh, hey, listen,” Sarah said, “I was only kidding . . .”
“What? No! I was only . . . Hey, what are you, my mother?”
Sarah laughed, over the phone she sounded like the Emperor from Star Wars. “Sorry if that sounded nosy,” she said. “It’s just that, you know, I’m starving to death over here. I’m about to dry up and blow away.”
“When I find Frank,” Al said, “I’ll put in a good word.”
“Thanks for nothing. So will I see you some time this afternoon? Like, late?”
“You’re not gonna let this go, are you?”
She toyed with the notion, TJ was the kind of guy who slept until noon on a good day, she didn’t have a key to his place, but the lock on his door was a hardware store special, she could pull a Pearl Harbor on him, be all over him before he knew what hit him . . .
What a great idea.
The more she thought about it, the better she liked it. She did not even get upset when she got caught in a jam on the elevated section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, some guy got pranged by a nun driving a station wagon, the nun stood red-faced right in the middle of the road, the station wagon pointing the wrong way, the nun a little unsteady on her feet, waving her arms, yelling at two cops and pointing at the other car. Al just waited in line for her turn to get by. She got lucky in Greenpoint, she found a parking spot just down the block from TJ’s building. She was still sitting behind the wheel when TJ came out the front door with a girl on his arm.
Al shut the car off.
She looked like a girl, anyhow, she was tall, thin, nice rack, orange-blond hair, she was probably somewhere between fifteen an
d twenty. She was one of those kids that had it, it came steaming off her in waves, there wasn’t a guy on the street that didn’t turn and look her way. TJ hailed a passing gypsy cab, he put the girl into the backseat and then climbed in after her.
The Mitsubishi’s engine made ticking noises as it cooled off. The interior of the car was cooling, too, but silently. Alessandra Martillo was silent as well, and still. She thought about following the cab, but that seemed pointless. Got the knife in your chest, she told herself. Why twist it?
She could feel the heat leaching out of the car.
I won’t get cold, she told herself, I won’t let it touch me.
Some people could do it. Some people could decide not to be cold, and were not. Her uncle Bobby had been like that. He was the one who had taken her in, back when she was twelve, he’d searched the streets, the back alleys and empty buildings of Brownsville until he’d found her, and he had talked her into going home with him. “Come and stay with me and Anthony,” he’d told her. “You can have your own room, and it’ll be way better than this.” She remembered the ride back to his house in Queens, sitting on the back of the stunningly loud Harley hardtail, clutching his jacket for fear of being rattled off the end of the thing. Bobby had been a bear of a man, hairy, tattooed, long thin braid hanging off his chin. In the winter he had rarely worn a jacket. His only concession to the cold had been a vest, and she had watched him clean snow off his van windows with bare hands on days when most people didn’t leave more than a few square inches of skin exposed around their eyes.
I don’t feel it, Al told herself. I don’t feel a damn thing. But her body had already begun to betray her, her feet were beginning to tingle and the tips of her fingers were going numb.
“Aren’t you cold?” she had asked him once, not long after he had taken her in. “Can’t you feel it?”