They shook hands. The morning crowd had dwindled down to six customers besides the three of them. The place smelled as if it had been fried in something sweet and fatty.
“Better off not having people in the office see us together,” Milt said. “I give you information, someone connects the wires and I’ve got trouble.”
“You mean you can’t help anymore?” Lew asked.
“Who said that?”
He put his right hand to his chest. A heavy-legged waitress in a uniform that had once been yellow but now was a forlorn amber placed cups of coffee in front of them. They all ordered toasted onion bagels with cream cheese.
“Okay,” said Milt, picking up his cup. “What do you need?”
“You’re sure there was nothing in the things Catherine left at the office that might make someone want to kill her?”
“Nothing,” said Milt. “Of course you never know, but nothing, no secret deposition, overlooked piece of evidence, name of a bombshell witness, nothing.”
“Active cases?” Lew asked.
Franco was working on his second cup of coffee, his eyes moving from Lew to Milt to the front door of the deli behind the gray shadow where they sat.
Lew, I—”
“I know,” Lew said. “But things changed about an hour ago; a lawyer named Claude Santoro was found murdered in his office on LaSalle Street.”
“Excuse me,” said Franco, getting up. “I’m going to the men’s.”
When Franco was gone, Lew asked, “You’ve heard of Santoro ?”
“Not a criminal defense lawyer far as I know,” said Milt. “Want me to check him out?”
“Yes.”
He took out his notebook and wrote.
“Andrej Posnitki, Posno,” Lew said.
Milt wrote and said, “Rings no bells. What else?”
“John Pappas,” Lew said.
“Maybe.”
“He’s the son of Bernice Pappas, father of Dimitri Pappas and Stavros Pappas.”
“Yep,” said Milt writing quickly, “I remember now. A noble family. The old woman, kids. Yeah, I remember John.”
“See what you can find on all of them.”
Holiger looked at his list and read: “Santoro, Posnitki, the Pappas clan. Anything else?”
“Not for now,” Lew said.
Holiger closed and pocketed his notebook as Franco came back and sat next to Lew.
“I’d ask you to come to the house for dinner with me and Ruthie, or we could take you out someplace,” Milt said. “But I know better. If you decide down the line while you’re in town to take up the offer, you’ve got my number.”
“Thanks, Milt,” Lew said.
“No, Lewis, I mean it. Ruthie would like to see you.”
“I’ll—” Lew began.
Holiger held up a hand and said, “Whenever you’re ready.”
He got up. So did Franco and Lew. Milt said, “Good to meet you, Franco. Take care of yourself, Lewis, and call me tonight about this.”
He patted the pocket of his jacket where he had placed his notebook.
“Now?” asked Franco when Milt was gone.
“Uncle Tonio’s,” Lew said.
“Right.”
“You ever hear of Rebecca Strum?” Lew asked as they walked to the garage where Franco’s tow truck was parked.
“Sure, yeah,” he said. “You kiddin’? Angie’s a reader, read all of her books. They’re lined up in the case in our bedroom, a couple in the built-in case in the dining room. Everybody knows Rebecca Strum.”
John Pappas stood against the wall in the kitchen watching his mother lay out the ingredients for her famous Kibbeh Bissanieh , baked lamb and wheat. It was one of his favorites. He enjoyed the smells of the kitchen, the clanking of mixing bowels and wooden spoons, the sound of cracked wheat being crushed.
His mother, wiping her hands on her apron, looked over her shoulder at Pappas for an instant smile and then went back to work. She sang a medley of random lines she remembered from almost forgotten songs.
“‘Born free,’” she sang, “‘Free as a rainbow round my shoulder, free as that old devil moon in your eyes, free as the wind and the rain in your hair.’”
Pappas plucked a pine nut from a small pile in his left palm and dropped it on his tongue.
Stavros and Dimitri were born into the world of their father and their grandmother. Their mother had disappeared when Stavros was learning to talk and Dimitri learning to walk. Stavros remembered her as tall, thin, pale with red hair. Dimitri remembered her not at all. Her name was Irene and she was not to be spoken of. The few times the name Irene had come up—a television character, a waitress in a restaurant—John Pappas had looked at his sons, seeking a reaction. He got none.
It was not a world they would have chosen, but they had accepted it without childhood whimper or teenage rebellion. This was a family in which nothing but complete loyalty would be tolerated.
The brothers didn’t want to walk in their father’s shoes. They didn’t know what might be lurking in those shoes and they did not want to know.
They did what they were told, what they had to do, to protect father, grandmother and each other. But in the end, Stavros and Dimitri, though they might well be willing to die to preserve the family, most certainly did not want to be a part of the family business. John Pappas accepted this. The line of assassins went back forever. It would probably stop with him. It was time.
Bernice Pappas added the mixture of water-soaked bulgur wheat, onions, ground lamb, pine nuts, salt and pepper. She tasted the mixture, found it acceptable and kneaded and laid it out on a baking pan. She looked down at what she had done and smiled as she turned her head toward her son and placed the pan in the oven.
“Will they have the balls to kill him?” she asked, closing the oven door, wiping her hands on her apron and looking at her son.
“Yes,” said Pappas, lifting the palm of his hand to his mouth to get the last four pine nuts.
“Posno has to die,” she said, moving bowls, wooden spoons, cutting boards to the sink.
“I know,” said Pappas.
They had agreed to this a long time ago and many times since. He always listened dutifully when his mother brought it up again. It did have to be done. Posno was too great a threat to him and the family.
“Get rid of him before he gets you killed,” she said, searching for something in the refrigerator. She retrieved a small bottle of spring water and moved to the kitchen table where she sat in a wooden chair.
“Yes,” Pappas agreed.
He could already smell the Kibbeh Bissanieh baking.
What, he wondered, was Posno doing now?
Andrej Posnitki followed the Pappas brothers. He was careful. He would not and could not be seen. It was the reason he had survived his entire life. He was careful. He was ruthless. He thought neither of the future nor the past.
Posno drove a new Prius, which didn’t deliver nearly the hybrid mileage he had been promised. He accepted this fact. He knew he was capable of convincing the automobile dealer on Harlem Avenue to take the car back. Posno could be very convincing, but he also had a simple philosophy: Almost everyone can’t be trusted. If you were to right each wrong done to you, you would never get through the day and there would be a trail of the broken and the dead. Save your wrath for the big threats to your existence and your work.
Somewhere in the files of Catherine Fonesca, wherever they might be, was information that would end the existence of Andrej Posnitki. He would not let that happen.
Uncle Tonio was a dealer in merchandise.
Toys, DVDs, wallets, purses, chairs, you name it, from sources in China. Knockoff computers, watches from Japan. Rugs that looked like handmade Turkish from Poland. Lamps that looked like Art Deco 1935, but were made in 2006 in India. Leather sofas, both real and synthetic, from Indonesia. Ancient Peruvian jewelry made last year in Lima. In his fifty-one years in business, there was little that one imagined or made to fit in a cr
ate that had not passed through Uncle Tonio’s warehouse on Fullerton.
Lew didn’t think anyone in the family, even his father, knew what most of the merchandise was or had been.
Every few weeks when Uncle Tonio came to dinner he brought a gift. Once, Lew remembered, it was two cartons of Cheerios. They ate it for a year. Another time the gift had been a small wooden tomato crate packed with forty dolls that looked like Barbies, but weren’t. They were all dressed in yellow tennis outfits complete with yellow visors and a plastic tennis racquet. For years Angie had given them away to her friends for birthdays and Christmas.
Lew’s cousin Mario and most of the family assumed there was something not quite legal about Tonio’s business. When they said it aloud, they did it with a knowing smile of pride. Maybe the family actually had a Mafia connection? Maybe Uncle Tonio had known Capone, Nitti, Giancanna?
Tonio did nothing to dispel the belief. He encouraged it.
“So,” someone might ask over dinner, “what’s new, how’s business?”
Tonio would keep eating, looking at his food, raising his fork as a prelude to answering and say, “You know, pretty good, not complaining. Pass the pepper.”
If Uncle Tonio was a family legend, his warehouse on Fullerton held the awe of a haunted castle. The two-story concrete building was about the size of a football stadium. It didn’t stand out in the neighborhood. Most of the buildings in the area were big, constructed for storage and shipping. The brick ones dated back to the late 1800s. One had been an icehouse till the 1940s.
Uncle Tonio’s warehouse had been built at the beginning of World War II to hold military vehicles—half-tracks, jeeps, trucks, staff cars. No one lived within six blocks of Uncle Tonio’s. During the day, the warehouse and the neighborhood were benign, a set for a television cop show chase, complete with fissures and buckles in the pavement and a very nice quartet of train tracks long gone to rust.
At night, the warehouse made the transformation to haunted castle, dark except for small nightlights on some of the buildings, looming, moaning distant sounds from traffic on the expressway and the occasional bark of guard dogs inside some of the surrounding buildings.
Franco parked in front of the loading dock that was also the main entrance. Uncle Tonio’s warehouse looked exactly the way it had more than twenty years ago when Lew had last seen it. It also looked nothing like it had twenty years ago. It was just as massive, but the man saw what the boy had not. The warehouse was sagging, with small, narrow and not clean windows. The concrete block walls were cracked. Lew stood still in front of the loading dock.
“What?” asked Franco.
“The castle’s gone.”
“What?” asked Franco, walking past Lew. “Castles? You worry me, Lewie.”
Lew moved to Franco’s side and they climbed up the steps of the dock. The rusting handrail shook. Franco had called Uncle Tonio who said he would meet them. And he did.
Uncle Tonio was at the open double door in front of them, arms at his side, legs apart. He wore what he always wore, dark slacks, a sweater in the fall and winter, and highly polished shoes, a long-sleeved light blue or white shirt and a colorful tie with matching suspenders. Uncle Tonio’s supply of sweaters, shirts and ties was nearly infinite, probably the tax-free tariff of hundreds of shipments. He never wore the same clothes twice.
Tonio’s hairline was now, as always, receded as far back as Lew’s. Tonio was lean and no more than five foot eight. He was, Lew thought, what Lew would be at seventy-two with some big differences. Tonio’s eyes danced. He bounced on his heels. His natural look was a smile.
“Come here,” he said, stepping in front of Lew, examining his face and giving him a hug.
Tonio smelled, as he always had, of peppermint.
He touched Franco’s arm and said, “Come on.”
They followed him inside. Tonio closed the doors behind them. Light through the few dirty windows and fluorescents tingled ahead of them as they followed the quick-paced Tonio down a wide aisle of wooden pallets on both sides. The pallets were stacked with cardboard and wooden boxes, fifty-and one-hundred-pound thick brown paper bags. The walls of merchandise were three or four times as high as Lew. Lew remembered that there were three more such aisles, each almost as long as a football field.
“Just got in from China,” Tonio said, nodding at a pallet full of brown boxes. “Fifty-thousand pair of women’s underpants, choice of pink, white, black. Would you believe there’s this big town over there where all they do is make women’s underwear ?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He disappeared to the left. Lew and Franco followed. In front of them was a light.
“There,” he said. “Herman opened it for you.”
Franco and Lew shook hands with Herman. Herman was lean, black, hair still dark, and had served in Korea with Tonio.
“Good to see you,” Herman said.
Lew nodded.
The irony of Tonio and Herman’s friendship was that Tonio was a dark Sicilian and Herman a light-skinned offspring of the melting pot removed from Africa by six generations. People sometimes mistook them for brothers.
That was fine with Tonio and Herman. Herman had twice saved Tonio’s life. They never spoke about Korea. Not to strangers, friends, family or each other.
In front of them was a steel-mesh-enclosed area with its sliding door open. The lock and key were in Herman’s hand. Ceiling lights in the room were bright. The wall to the left where they entered the enclosure was lined with neatly sealed cartons labeled with black Magic Marker: KITCHEN; BATH; LAUNDRY ROOM; DINING AREA; LIVING ROOM; BEDROOM; OFFICE; LEW’S CLOTHES; CATHERINE’S CLOTHES. On the other two walls were Catherine and Lew’s furniture: bed; sofas; chairs; tables; desks; lamps; file drawers. It could have been a furniture show room.
“Sliders,” said Tonio. “Take a look. When we lock up, we slide ’em closed. Temperature inside is a steady seventy-four degrees. Nobody but family goes in, nobody but Herman.”
“Thank you,” Lew said.
“Hey, I took care,” said Tonio. “Angela supervised the packing and moving.”
They stood looking. Lew recognized everything but it all looked unfamiliar. He had come in search of a piece of the past that might lead to who had killed Catherine. But here was his life with Catherine, a small lovingly kept museum.
“Franco,” Tonio said, touching Franco’s shoulder. “Let’s leave Lewis alone. Lewis, you know how to make your way back to my office from here?”
“Yes,” he said.
“When you’re ready. Want something to drink, eat?”
“No,” Lew said.
“I could use something to eat,” said Franco.
“We got it,” said Tonio.
When the last echo of their footsteps and voices were gone, Lew spent another minute or five looking at chairs, tables, bookcases, cabinets. Then he made himself move to Catherine’s file cabinet and kneeled.
Half an hour, one drawer, and one slightly aching back later, he stood to stretch.
“Find anything?”
Lew didn’t turn. He recognized the voice.
“No.”
“What’s in your hand?”
Lew held up a framed photograph of himself and Catherine at a lodge in Wisconsin. It had been in the front of the drawer, either put there by Catherine or packed there by Angie.
“Wife?” asked Dimitri.
“Yes.”
“Someone killed Posno’s lawyer,” Stavros said.
Lew turned. Stavros’s single unblinking eye was focused between Lew’s eyes. Dimitri, at his side, was still looking at the photograph in Lew’s hand.
“Posno’s lawyer?” Lew said.
“Followed you when you left our house last night,” said Stavros. “Posno’s lawyer and another man.”
“Aponte-Cruz,” said Dimitri.
“Aponte-Cruz,” Stavros repeated. “Now, the lawyer is dead. Our father doesn’t want anything to happen to you.”
�
��Why?” Lew asked.
The brothers glanced at each other.
“Our father likes you,” said Stavros.
Lew shook his head. That wasn’t the answer.
“He wants you to find whatever your wife had on Posno,” said Stavros. “He wants to be sure Posno doesn’t get it before you do.”
“What do you want?” asked Lew.
“Me, personally? I want Posno dead,” said Stavros. “He took my eye. I’d settle for his eye. Is it here, your wife’s files on Posno?”
“So, Posno killed his own lawyer?” Lew answered the question with his own question.
“Maybe,” said Dimitri. “Maybe lots of people didn’t like him. He was a lawyer.”
“You’re here to protect me from Posno,” said Lew.
“Right,” said Stavros.
“But you have guns pointed at me.”
“Things get complicated,” said Stavros nervously.
“I know,” said Lew.
“Keep going through the drawers,” said Stavros. “We’ll watch. You find something, you give it to us and we go away.”
“Just be—” Dimitri began.
He stopped speaking because a thick arm was around his neck. Franco lifted him about a foot off of the ground, took the gun and threw it to Lew and let Dimitri fall on the concrete floor. Stavros, at the same time, was seated on the floor, his head back against the steel meshing. Uncle Tonio had punched him in the kidney, hard. Stavros had gone down groaning.
“Got by us,” said Tonio. “Sorry. Saw their car parked near the dock. Franco recognized it.”
“We were eating Polish sausage sandwiches,” Franco explained, eyes moving between the brothers on the floor. “Saved you one.”
“Thanks,” Lew said.
“These?” asked Tonio, looking at Stavros and Dimitri. “What?”
The brothers had made it to their feet. Stavros was shaking his head.
“Nothing,” Lew said. “Let them go.”
“Hold it,” said Stavros, leaning back against the meshing. His good eye rolled, still trying to focus. His glass eye looked at nothing. “Dimi, you okay?”
Dimitri nodded yes.
“We’re not very good at this,” said Stavros with a sigh.
“No, you’re not,” Lew said.
Always Say Goodbye: A Lew Fonesca Mystery Page 7