He gestured to the goon in the blue suit and turned his back to me again, standing at the obscured window, as if he were watching the snow fall. The interview was almost over.
“You want to live, don’t you, Lombardi?”
“Like everybody else.”
“Livin’ is hard, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“You’re not stupid. I can see that.” “I try not to be.”
“Ten thousand,” he said without turning. “You just find what I want and bring it here.”
CHAPTER
30
Superman and Calamari Breath were waiting outside in the Plymouth, so I had the blue suit call a cab. It cost a few bucks, but it was cheaper than a hospital bill.
The snow was deep by the time I reached home, over the tops of my shoes. I kicked them off and stuffed newspaper into the toes to hold their shape, hung my wet socks in the bathroom, put on my most comfortable slippers, and made coffee in the kitchen. Finally, I sank into my favorite armchair and opened Shork’s blue metal box.
It was no surprise that he’d been living well in East Flatbush. There were a dozen different files, some containing only a single print, others multiple prints and negatives. Most of the photographs were of young women propped on an unmade bed in front of a blank wall. The same bed in each shot. The women were naked or in their underwear; a naked man or woman next to them. Careless bankers’ daughters, politicians’ errant wives, young socialites who were too trusting with their escorts, whose coming-out parties offered more drink than they could handle. A few moments of unconsciousness, a ready camera, and their honor was gone, their futures in hock. The faces all had the same pitiable, lost look.
There were only a few male victims. I looked for Carlson among them, without luck. Maybe Shork had turned over everything, or maybe Carlson had told me the truth: not himself in the pictures, but someone he cared about. I didn’t see his pal Jorgenson, either. One of the women, then?
I put the box on the top shelf of my coat closet, poured another cup of coffee and watched the snow fall outside my kitchen window. The same snow was falling outside Alberto Scarpetti’s solarium and on the cratered street beyond Carlson’s empty house. It was falling on the Raymond Street Jail and wherever Teddy and Chick were hiding; falling outside Liam’s window at the hospital; falling where the sad, shamed women in Shork’s pictures lived; falling on Father Giacomo’s neighborhood prowler as he sought shelter from another grim, inhospitable night. The snow bound them all together in Brooklyn. It bound me, also. I felt responsible now, in a way, for every one of them.
It stopped snowing around seven o’clock, so I drove to the Kings County Hospital to see Liam. He was cheerily making up limericks about the nurses, a sure sign of recovery. He might lose some hearing in his left ear, but the rest of him would mend. He’d get his car repaired when he got out of the hospital and go right back to the work he loved.
I stopped at the Home Run Diner after visiting hours were over. Lucille wasn’t around, but her brother Sam was behind the counter poaching eggs. I was glad to see him. He had a sunnier disposition, and his coffee was potable.
Nobody in the diner was making jokes about Carlson anymore. He was already old news. The Brooklyn Eagle I picked up from the counter said that he was being buried on Saturday in Greenwood Cemetery. It would be a hero’s funeral, replete with tributes, harangues against the city’s criminal element and poignant, personal reflections on the late, great crime fighter’s career by the city fathers.
If they only knew.
To avoid another harangue from Gino, I drove back to the neighborhood and parked across from St. Margaret’s until well after ten. The latest replacement glass was still unbroken in the church door, and absolutely nobody, suspicious or not, was on the street. I went straight to bed when I got home.
The dream added a new twist. Teddy Mitchell and Chick Gunderson were suspended on either side of me now, and Alberto Scarpetti had taken Arnold’s place with the two goons. The soles of his shoes were embedded with spikes. Chick let go of the bridge first, grabbed me by the belt, and hung on. Teddy followed, clutching my leg. I couldn’t shake either of them free, and the longer they clung, the more I felt my own hold slipping. Alberto, oppressively close, smiled and said, “This time you won’t wake up, Lombardi,” as he spiked the back of my hand.
It was the telephone again that woke me. Three in the morning, and I knew what that meant. I stared at it and let it ring several times before picking it up.
“Hello, Nick,” I said into the receiver. “So, who is it this time?”
“You gettin’ psychic, Eddie?”
“Who is it?”
“Don’t get so far ahead. I got a routine to follow here. You’ll mess it up if you go anticipatin’ too much.”
“Okay, okay,” I said glumly, and waited.
“You ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“We found one of Arnold’s pals. The Mitchell kid.”
I sat erect, threw the covers aside and set my feet on the floor. “That’s great, Nick! Where is he?”
“Empty lot on Ralph Avenue, near Sutter. Under a foot of snow. Sorry, Eddie. Didn’t mean to get your hopes up. You wanna come and look anyway?”
I didn’t answer.
“Eddie?”
“Sure, Nick. Be right over.”
The empty lot was around the corner from the building where Caroline and the Mitchells lived. Even at three-thirty on a freezing winter morning, there was a sizable crowd outside. A half dozen uniformed cops were keeping back the curious while the forensic crew did their work and the ambulance attendants ran their heater and waited. DeMassio was chatting with a couple of detectives from the 73rd precinct. They were all smoking cigarettes. Between the steam of their breath and the smoke, their faces were almost invisible.
Without moving closer, I looked at the body of Teddy Mitchell. It was face down, lying near a heap of snow-covered rubble, the remains of a building that had once occupied the space. The forensic crew had removed the snow cover. A large pool of frozen blood surrounded the corpse.
When DeMassio finally saw me through the cigarette haze and steam, he left the other detectives and strolled over, raising his coat collar against the wind.
“Bullet in the back,” he said gruffly instead of a hello. “.45 caliber.”
“When’d it happen?”
“No idea, yet.”
“Anybody hear the shot?”
“This is Brownsville, Eddie. Nobody hears shots.”
“The bullet… hollow point?”
“Can’t tell until we turn him over,” DeMassio said, “but that’s a pretty big pool of blood under him. Smaller exit hole would mean less, especially in this friggin’ cold. What’re you thinkin’, Eddie?”
“That maybe there’s more people involved in this mess than I thought.”
“Besides Scarpetti?”
“Besides Teddy, Chick, and Arnold.” I told him about Caroline, Charlotte, and Jimmy.
“I knew there’d be a woman in this,” he said without smiling. We walked back to the sidewalk.
“How come the 73rd called you?” I asked.
“They know I like to look at stiffs in freezing cold at three in the morning.”
“Just like me.”
“Just like you, Eddie.”
I was about to ask who’d discovered the body when I saw the two hunched figures in the back of a prowl car. I had to look twice to be sure. “Excuse me a minute, Nick,” I said. I walked past the uniformed cop guarding it and rapped on the back window. Caroline Hutchinson, dour-faced, rolled down the glass. A petulant Charlotte sat beside her, offering a quick look of murderous contempt before turning her face away. The cop pulled me back and Caroline rolled up the window. When I tried to keep eye contact, she turned away, too. I walked back to DeMassio.
“Let me guess,” he said, jeering.
“That’s Caroline Hutchinson. It’s her brother Jimmy that I was tel
lin’ you about.”
“And the other one?”
“Her younger sister, Charlotte. What’s goin’ on, Nick?”
“One of ’em found the body is all I know,” said DeMassio, just as a uniformed cop got behind the wheel of the prowl car and started the engine.
“Which one?”
“Beats me. Why don’t you ask at the 73rd? I’m goin’ back to bed.”
Caroline’s sad, tormented eyes met mine as the prowl car pulled away from the curb. It turned onto Sutter Avenue and headed east, toward the 73rd precinct station.
DeMassio was driving away, too. I lingered at the edge of the empty lot before getting into my own car. The foren-sics crew had managed to turn Teddy Mitchell’s frozen body onto its back. The front of his shirt and coat had been shot away, and the exit hole in his chest was as large as a Softball.
For just a moment, I thought about going back to Bensonhurst and staying there, like a monk in his monastery. But when I made the turn at Sutter Avenue, I headed east instead, toward Caroline, the 73rd precinct station, and all the trouble I could handle.
CHAPTER
31
I waited in the car outside the 73rd until Caroline walked out alone, eyes bloodshot and teary. I honked the horn to get her attention.
“I’m ready for that brunch now, if you are,” I said. She looked like she wanted to say no, so I put on a sour face and followed with an admonition: “Hey, if you turn me down, I may never ask you again. You have no idea how fast my social calendar fills up.”
Reluctantly, without a smile, she got in. “Where’s Charlotte?” I asked.
“They still have to ask her more questions.”
“So how come you’re leaving her? I thought she was your… responsibility.”
Her eyes turned sadder. “She didn’t want me with her.”
“She found the body, then?”
“Yes.”
“Coming home from one of her drunks?”
“She wasn’t drunk this time,” she said defensively.
“And?”
“That’s all I know. She was cutting through the lot and she saw him. She came inside, and I called the police.”
“And Mrs. Mitchell?”
“I told her, too. I tried to keep her inside, but she ran out and saw him lying there. It was horrible, seeing him like that. She became hysterical, so I brought her back inside and called the doctor who lives on the next block. He gave her a sedative.”
“She all right now?”
“Yes.”
“And you?”
“I’ll have to look in on her in a while. Then I have to go to work.”
“I thought you worked the graveyard shift.”
“I was just filling in. Eight to four is my normal shift. I need to be home when Charlotte comes back.”
“Whenever that is.”
“Please, Eddie. I’ve already told you…”
“I know, I know. Are you hungry?”
“I suppose I should eat.”
“It’s decided, then.”
We drove to the Home Run Diner. Lucille was back slinging hash and serving up her deadly brown brew. She did a double-take when I walked in with Caroline, and I did one when they greeted each other by name.
“Well, at least I know now what hospital you work at,” I said as we took the farthest booth from the door. “Which ward?”
“Pediatrics.”
“Babies, huh?”
She almost smiled. “My husband and I used to come here a lot, even before I was a nurse. Lucille has never seen me here with another man. Not since.”
“I’m sorry. I would’ve picked another place if I’d known.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Past is past.”
“No offense, but I don’t think you mean that.”
“Perhaps I don’t. I guess I just like to think that I do.”
“You loved your husband a lot, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I miss him every day. Every minute, practically.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“It’s not obvious, but I can see it.”
“You’re very perceptive, then.”
“Not really. I’m kind of in the same boat you are.”
“You lost someone you loved?”
“Yes.”
“A wife?”
“Someone.”
Lucille brought two cups of coffee, told us what else we were ordering, and went back to the counter. I drank mine, but Caroline just stared into her cup as if it had no bottom.
Finally, I asked, “Why didn’t Charlotte want you to stay with her… at the precinct station?”
“Eddie, please…”
“She figures in this now,” I said. “I need to know.”
“I don’t understand…”
“How she figures?”
“Yes.”
“She found Teddy. Maybe he was still alive when she found him. Maybe he told her something.” The size of the exit wound in Teddy’s chest told me he hadn’t lived long enough to say his initials, but maybe she knew something anyway. Maybe she knew all of it. Not that she’d ever tell me.
“I embarrassed her by being there,” Caroline answered. “I always seem to have that effect. Even before our parents died in a car accident and she became my… responsibility, my presence always antagonized her. Charlotte hates being second to anyone; she doesn’t like to be told no; she can’t tolerate criticism or rejection. She likes to be in control.”
“She’s out of control.”
“You didn’t see her in the police station. How calmly and accurately she described what she’d seen. How thoughtfully she fielded the detectives’ questions. That’s why she wanted me to leave.”
“You were cutting in on her moment.”
“That’s one way of putting it. She couldn’t fully be an adult with me there. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” I said, as Lucille delivered two plates of eggs over easy and steaming hash browns. We ate without talking and finished at the same time. I was mopping up the last of my egg with dry toast when we came back to the subject of Teddy.
“Why is he dead?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered, and it wasn’t altogether a lie. Unless Teddy had been carrying the papers that Alberto Scarpetti had offered me ten thousand dollars to find, the kid would’ve been more valuable alive than dead. Even if he’d had the papers with him, he’d be worth keeping alive until Chick Gunderson, Scarpetti’s other loose thread, was gathered up and his mouth stitched. Then they’d both be disposable. And if Charlotte knew something as well, Scarpetti’d have no qualms about silencing her with the others. My own plan was to keep looking for Chick, keep clear of Superman and Calamari Breath, and somehow return the missing papers to the D.A.’s office. That would salvage Chick’s life at least, and I could get back to working on Arnold’s murder charge.
I took Caroline home just before sunrise. She talked about Jimmy and Teddy all the way back, as if they were still alive. She talked about her husband, too, about making a pilgrimage to the barren Pacific atoll where he died. I offered to drive her to work later, but she’d changed her mind and wouldn’t be going in. She’d stay with Mrs. Mitchell and offer what small comfort she could. They shared the same grief now. They were sisters-in-death. Within that special sorority, Caroline would begin to slip away from the world, to dwell more and more on the dead at the expense of the living. Dead parents, a dead husband, a dead brother. Eventually, she’d even cut her ties with Charlotte for the sake of the dead. I could see it coming, as big as a billboard, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
And, of course, I had my own problems. When I got home, I found a handwritten sign taped to my front door to remind me of one of them. Gino’s perfect penmanship.
“That’s four in a row,” the sign said.
CHAPTER
32
I needed sleep, but I wasn’t up
to confronting those fearsome dreams again. So I busied myself with chores for the next couple of hours: washing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning my gun, matching my socks. The phone rang three times, and each time I let it ring. It was either Gino howling about broken glass, or Nick DeMassio telling me he’d found Chick Gunderson’s blood-soaked body. I was almost out of leads, almost at the end of a dead-end street bounded by high brick walls. Somehow, it all had to turn into open road.
I ran out of busywork around ten o’clock, and sleep finally overtook me in my easy chair. My dormant nightmare roared back. Alberto Scarpetti had the honors again, driving a railroad spike through each hand with a sledge while Calamari Breath and Superman waited to eviscerate me with long, saw-toothed spearheads. The familiar catwalk under the Brooklyn Bridge seemed several stories higher now, the drop more precipitous. It would be an eternity before I hit the water, a fall into unending darkness. A hell, if not Hell itself. There’d be no telephone to wake me up, no goombah gently nudging my shoulder and offering a human smile. Only phantoms, fear, and the silent, infinite night.
I awoke in a sweat, but consciousness didn’t entirely lift the fear from me. The dream seemed to linger in short, staccato flashes each time I closed my eyes. It was more than a proximity to evil, or to ill winds. I’d become cursed somehow, and even an exorcism wouldn’t drive the marauding demons away. Only solving an apparently unsolvable set of murders could save me now.
My options had dwindled to a single long shot: Carlson’s demure little secretary. The kitchen clock told me it was eleven-fifteen in the morning, meaning that I’d have just enough time to drive downtown and be in front of the Municipal Building by lunch hour.
She came out with her coworkers, in no one’s company, bundled against a gusty wind. She crossed the triangular concrete island occupied by Borough Hall and crossed again onto Fulton Street, passing Bickford’s and entering another, smaller coffee shop a block further down. If she was in mourning, it didn’t show in her pert, secretarial face. Carlson’s little sex toy. She took a front booth, right by the window, and I followed.
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