by Norman Green
He had grabbed her then, dropped what he was doing and pretended to try and stick his thick rough-skinned fingers down the back of her collar. She remembered shrieking, then laughing when he let her go. “I feel everything you feel,” he told her. “Every single thing.”
“So how come you’re not cold?”
“I’m the same temperature you are, I just don’t let it bother me.”
Al had never mastered the art, never discovered the trick to feeling something without letting it rule her.
She heard Anthony’s voice. “Get back in this house and put your jacket on!” Anthony was Tio Bobby’s partner, he and Bobby were as different as two people could be. He was Anglo, blue and blond, tall, thin, fussy, self-consciously gay. Tio Bobby simply was what he was, and you could take it or you could leave it.
She remembered Anthony, down on one knee so that he could get eye to eye with her. “Your uncle Roberto,” he told her, “is not a normal person. You shouldn’t try to be like him.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll catch your death,” he told her. “Besides, you need to learn how to be Alessandra. Put on your jacket.”
She was shivering despite her best efforts at self-control. No matter how hard she tried to let all the tension drain from her muscles, no matter how much she tried to still the tremors, they returned time after time.
“Tio Bobby,” she whispered. “I miss you.” She wondered if it were possible for him to miss her as well, and if her absence bothered him. But he might be better off now, she told herself. He might be at peace.
She had not been a gracious houseguest. Her time alone on the Brooklyn streets had turned her and she had tested the depths of his desire to save her. As a child she had been a gifted shoplifter, prone to fits of rage, and thanks to her father’s lessons, capable of violence beyond her age and physical stature, but all of her anger broke across Tio Bobby’s broad shoulders like ocean swells on a stone wall. Rarely had she managed to ruffle his implacable serenity. He had not tried to control her, she could appreciate that now, he had manipulated her, steered her, nudged her gently into a more constructive way of being. Instead of forbidding violence, he had helped her harness it, and there had been a succession of teachers: aikido, kendo, jiujitsu, krav maga, and more.
She had to admit defeat. She hugged herself, shivering uncontrollably. She started the car, sat suffering until it warmed up. “I can’t live like this, Bobby,” she said to the car. “I need more than this.”
“You don’t need to steal stuff from the store,” he’d told her once. “You have everything. You got your own room, your own clothes, all your own stuff. Anything else you need, you come to me. Okay?”
“Why.” Sullen.
“Because I love you.” She had thought, at the time, that he’d misunderstood the question. “And Anthony loves you.” She had never been totally sure of that one. “And your father loves you, too, he just doesn’t know how to show it.” That, too, had seemed a dubious assumption. “You have everything, Alessandra.”
That can’t be right, she told herself.
There has to be something better than this.
And who fucking needs TJ Conrad anyway, she thought, if that’s what he wants why not leave him to it, let him go hang out with some teenybopper who’s all impressed because he doesn’t live at home and is old enough to buy beer, God, why is it that guys have so much trouble with real women, and if he can’t handle being with someone who might give him a little competition for the upper bunk or the steering wheel or even just the TV remote, well then, fuck you, pal, go ahead, go on back over there and eat at the kiddie’s table if you ain’t big and bad enough to play with the big girls, but then again she had to admit that they hadn’t had The Conversation, the one about rules of engagement, and that maybe was you know her own fault, especially if you considered that if someone was gonna have to be the adult and bring it up chances were pretty good it wasn’t gonna be him, and maybe she was a little bit guilty of comparing every guy she knew to Tio Bobby and wishing that they could be more like him except you know, straight, but she would be goddamned if she was gonna turn into some old hen that spends all of her time trying to chase off all the other chickens, she was not gonna by God act like some kind of police sergeant and if she could only stop thinking about him all the time and what’s the point in wishing he was something different from who he really is and if the guy only has a size 32 waist there ain’t shit you can do to try and make him fill up a pair of 38 jeans no matter what you do and goddammit all to hell why is it that life just has to fucking suck so fucking bad sometimes.
Eight
Alessandra barely got through the door before Sarah was on to her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Al said, disappointed. She thought she had a better game face than that.
“Yeah, sure,” Sarah said. “What happened, you and the BF get into a fight?”
Al perched her butt on the edge of Sarah’s desk. “Something like that.” It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to Sarah about it, and it wasn’t that she didn’t trust her, it was more that she didn’t even know what to say: Yeah, I saw TJ get into a car with this chick . . . So what? None of her clients would accept that as any sort of proof, no lawyer and no judge would be impressed with evidence like that. You had to have skin, you had to have contact, you had to have a nice clear picture of the smoking gun.
So to speak.
Sarah squeezed Al’s forearm. It seemed like the first friendly human touch she’d had in a while. “Sorry to hear it,” Sarah said. “What do you want to do first—Frank, Mrs. West, or Marty’s latest threats?”
“God, is he still calling here?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t seem like he’s calming down at all. If anything, he sounds madder than ever.”
“Just what we need. If he says anything that sounds actionable, save the recording. And remind me later to drop by our old building and slip the doorman over there a fifty.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Well, if Marty’s serious, anybody trying to serve us is gonna go there first. For fifty bucks the doorman will send them off to look in Long Island somewhere. Might buy us a couple days.”
“Ohmygod. You think he’ll really sue?”
“That would be his next logical step. What do you have on Mrs. West? How come you didn’t want to wrap that up?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I got a funny feeling about it.”
“Yeah, but she’s the client, she’s paying us to be on her side.”
“I know. But take a look at this.” Sarah turned to her computer, brought up a site that she had bookmarked. “This is a picture of Mrs. West, back in the day. I found it in the New York Times, they were covering some kind of charity thing she was involved with.”
“Wow. She was fine.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Here’s a couple shots of Bats, his picture is all over the Web. I got this one from his kids’ Web site, but he was everywhere else, too, I think he was one of those guys who knows everybody, and not just casually, either. He seems to have had a close personal relationship with every New York politician alive, along with all the movers and shakers, even the backdoor guys you never heard of.”
“His kids have a Web site?”
“Yeah, all squishy, ‘We miss you, Daddy,’ novenas to Saint Jude, sappy poems, ‘roses are red, violets are blue, we hope you’re not dead, and we miss you,’ and all like that. And this . . .” She pulled up another site. “Is a picture of Thomas West.” It was an unremarkable image of an ordinary-looking, middle-aged guy in a gray suit.
“He looks like an accountant,” Al said. “Man, you got to watch the quiet ones.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“So how did he wind up with a hot mama like Aggie West?”
“Big investment firm organized a retreat in the Catskills. They were shilling for some Japanese bank that was trying to make a splash in the U.S. commodities markets. Thomas and Agatha were both in
attendance. I don’t know how the Japanese bank made out, but Thomas nailed Agatha Friday night right after the opening ceremonies. Apparently the booze was flowing like water and they both got into the mood. Saturday morning they both wake up nekkid, perform an encore, and the rest is history.”
“You sure it was him nailing her? Could have been the other way ’round. How the hell did you come up with all this?”
“Come on, he’s a rich guy, she’s a society dame, it was in all the gossip columns. Anyhow, the point is, not everybody was thrilled with the happy news. His sons didn’t go to the wedding, and neither did Bats.”
“You’re gonna tell me they didn’t do a City Hall drive-by.”
“No way, baby. Big fancy production, West probably spent a couple hundred thou on it.”
“Yeah, well . . . This all more or less backs up what old Agatha told us, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. But check this out.”
It was a story from the New York Daily News archive, and Al had to lean in close to read the fine text. “Yeah, okay,” she said, about halfway through. “The cops are always gonna look at the surviving relatives in a case like this one.”
“Yeah, that figures. Keep reading.”
“Okay.” Al finished the article. “You could have predicted that. I mean, there’s a lot of money here, you gotta know some assistant DA is gonna try to pin the father’s death on the sons. Says here he pushed for an indictment, but obviously he didn’t get one. He couldn’t have had much to go on. What’s this got to do with—”
“Suppose,” Sarah said. “Just suppose the sons did it.”
“Suppose they did. Where’s the money?”
“No idea, but Isaac West croaks in a yacht race. Last time I looked, yacht racing is definitely a rich boy’s sport. Right up there with polo. And Jake West changes his name and drops out of sight. So who knows how fat and happy J. Austin Smits really is? How do we know he’s not sitting on a bazillion dollars?”
“We don’t,” Al said. “I suppose we could go look. But what’s in it for us? We can’t blackmail the guy.”
“Al. Our client’s husband and his partner are murdered by her stepsons. In theory. We track down the surviving stepson, give his name and address to the grieving widow, who happens to be suffering with terminal cancer. What would you do if you were her?”
“Ooh.”
“Yeah, ooh is right, you’d go make sure J. Austin Smits preceded you down that broad highway to the Other Place, that’s what you’d do. And if I’m right, and you and I do have to go apply for a PI’s license after Marty pulls the rug out from under us, how’s that gonna look on the application?”
“Gonna look like we did our job. Anyhow, society’s not exactly losing any huge asset here, are they? The kid got away with murder, he gets whacked by old Agatha, she dies of cancer before she can even go to trial, we get paid. Everybody wins.”
“Al, honey, I’m not quite sure everyone else is gonna see it that way. I found that former assistant DA, he’s in private practice. He told me he’d been working with some chief of police out on the island, the cop was sure the kids did it. He gave me the chief’s name, I’d like to take a ride out and see if he’ll talk to me.”
“Okay. You could give that a try. And in a couple more days we’ll take a ride up to see J. Austin. First we gotta find Frank, what do you have on him?”
Sarah looked away. “I put everything I had on your desk.”
Frank Waters, only child of Ida and Francis, both parents now deceased. Born King’s County Hospital, Brooklyn, 1975. Minor legal troubles shortly after high school, B & E and simple assault, charges dropped against Frank and four other members of his graduating class. Enlisted in the army, served in Kuwait between the wars. Honorable discharge. Arrested for disturbing the peace with other veterans during several demonstrations, charges vacated. Investigated for inflammatory statements re: U.S. president who served part-time in the National Guard. Married Sarah Rizzo, fathered one child, divorced. Order of protection filed for and granted. Longshoreman, booted from union for non-payment of dues. Worked subsequently as bouncer at Club Mediterraneo, paid off the books. Inherited one-family house after death of mother. Proprietor of several unsuccessful businesses. Whereabouts currently unknown . . .
Not the dumbest guy in the world, Al thought. Certainly not the smartest. Ordinary Brooklyn kid, chasing the ever-more-elusive American dream, chances of success perhaps less than average. Normal guy, or within hailing distance of normal, anyhow. Remarkable mostly for his size.
Al read through it all again. Probably not a horrible kid, had some bad friends. Went away to war, came back, tilted at some windmills. Lost. Got in some heat for shooting his mouth off about George the Younger. Got married and had a kid.
Lost his job over a dumb-ass thing like union dues.
Got divorced.
Al wondered if there might not be more behind that order of protection. How much did Frank Waters smack his wife around, exactly? Probably ought to talk to the local precinct, see how often they made that particular house call.
Frank Waters looked like an also-ran, just one more schmuck who ran out of gas before he could get where he wanted to go.
Went broke.
Might have gotten a little desperate.
Al looked out her window. Frank Waters, she thought, what the hell did you get yourself into?
“Hey, Al.” Sarah’s voice rang from the outer office. “I got an address for Frankie.”
“Yeah? Where’s he at?”
Sarah gave her a street in Queens.
Al got up and stood in the doorway between the two rooms. “Great job,” she said. “How’d you come up with that so quick?”
“I called one of Frank’s meatball friends. I told the guy that Frankie got a rebate check on a flat-screen TV, but they sent it to me by mistake. Told him I didn’t want a dime from Frankie. I think I struck just the right tone, you know, bitter, angry, proud . . . Told him if he didn’t give me Frank’s address I was gonna change my mind and spend the money on shoes.”
“Wow,” Al said. “That’s terrific. Where’d you learn to lie so good?”
“Listen, you try raising an adolescent all by yourself, you’ll hear ’em all. You want I should come with you?”
Down, girl, Al thought. “No, that’s okay, I can handle it.”
“You sure? I mean, nobody knows Frankie like I do.”
Careful here, Al told herself. “Sarah, I’m not sure if you know how good you are at finding this stuff. I mean, it’s getting to the point where I don’t know what I’d do without you, but I think we ought to hold off a while before we get you involved in breaking and entering.”
The disappointment showed clear in Sarah’s face. “Oh, come on,” she said. “Is it really that big of a deal?”
“They send you to jail for it,” Al told her. “And take away your kid. That’s kind of a big deal.”
“I suppose. But, I mean, if this is gonna be my job, and everything . . .”
“Sarah, honey, I don’t want you to feel like you’re getting stuck doing the laundry and washing the dishes here, but certain things, you know, you gotta let me do what I do and you gotta keep doing what you do.” She remembered her mother, dead on the floor, remembered how it felt, suddenly all alone.
“All right,” Sarah said. “I understand.”
“Not mad, are you? It’s just that, if things get sticky—”
“No.” Sarah colored slightly. “What I really wanted, I guess, I wanted to go poking around in Frank’s stuff, see what he’s been doing without me to take care of him. Be nosy. Check up.”
“Yeah? Well, if I find anything juicy, I’ll take pictures.”
The superintendent at Frank Waters’s building in Queens was a short round Slavic guy who smelled a little bit like a sweaty dill pickle. His jaw and the top of his head were both covered with short black stubble. “Colombo?” he said, squinting up at Al. “Colombo . . .”
“Colo
mbo Messenger Service,” Al told him.
“You have business card?”
“No,” Al said.
The guy put a fat finger on the tip of his nose and pushed it sideways. “Colombo . . .”
Al took a hundred-dollar bill from her pocket, folded it lengthwise, held it out between two fingers. “Figure it out,” she said. “You got a key? I just need to look inside. Very quick.”
“I have key.” The guy looked at the bill, but he didn’t take it. “Vy they are sending voman?”
Oh, Christ, she thought. Another one. “Because we’re smarter than you are,” she snapped.
“Impossible,” he said.
God must love idiots, Al thought, he made so fucking many of them . . . “Okay, Einstein,” she said. “Where’s your kid go to school? What’s the name of his teacher? What’s her phone number? Hah?”
“I do not concern myself with these thing.” But he blinked, and he looked a little unsure of himself.
“No? Then who balances your checkbook? Who pays the bills? Who knows where you left your keys? Who found your wallet last time you lost it? Who finds the car when you get drunk off your ass and forget where you parked it? Hah?”
He grimaced at her and nodded his head, once. “All right,” he said.
Shut up, you won, she told herself, but the steam was up and she couldn’t stop. “You wanna know how come she’s smarter than you, you fat fuck? Because she’s hadda listen to bullshit from guys like you ever since the day she grew an ass, that’s why. Now, you gonna open up for me or do you want me to go back and tell ’em you don’t feel like playing ball? You want to deal with a guy instead of with me, believe me, Paco, we can send you a nice big one, and he’ll crack your fucking skull for you before he stands around talking shit in this stinking hallway all this time, I promise you. . . .”
“Easy,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. He plucked the money out of her hand. “Easy. I open door for you.”
“Fine,” Al told him. “You open the door, and then get lost.”
Apparently Frank’s housekeeper hadn’t been by in a while . . .