He left the motel at around nine and found himself standing in front of Uncle Cuddy’s house. It was empty, with a Realtor’s FOR SALE sign out front.
That’s the exact moment I drove by, after dropping Fanny at Tangles.
Tall, in his dark suit and turtleneck, Danny stood staring at the house and sign, hands down at his sides. I took note of him because he looked out of place, and I wondered then if he was somehow thinking of buying the house on Vanderhoosen Drive.
CHAPTER
NINE
THEN I DROVE ON WITHOUT another thought about the tall, out-of-place man on Vanderhoosen Drive. My thoughts were still on my good fortune, both in money and in love. Truly, the fates were shining favorably upon me, and I was intent on seeing how these new fortunes would develop and what my next move would be.
First, I had a few bits of business to take care of. The carting company was first, and I had to pay them in cash.
New York’s solid waste removal industry has had a somewhat unsavory history. The legacy of the Mafia years was that the carting companies still liked being paid in cash and gave a discount for doing so. Either that or they charged twenty percent more for not paying in cash, depending on how you looked at it.
Carting companies are the ones who make commercial refuse vanish. They come by and place large Dumpsters for me and my men to fill with all the crappy furniture, appliances, and belongings I am asked to clear out. Then they come with a large truck, upload the Dumpster, and drive it to a disposal site, usually somewhere out of state. I do not ask; I do not care. So I dropped by their offices, handed over the envelope, and got my receipt—which had the twenty percent larger figure for me to use to inflate my business expenses come April 14.
Next, I stopped by my post office box that I use for business, and then on to the real estate agent office that had brokered the house cleaning. The owner pays the agent, they take seven and a half percent, and I get mine—it is that simple, and it is how I scooped the other feelers to win the bid. Perhaps “broker” is too nice a word for it. I paid the real estate agent an extra two and a half percent to let me win, is what I did. They do not like Pete the Prick any more than I do—he is too pushy, and often unreliable. Frog is too naive to think to bribe them the extra two and a half percent. Not all real estate offices will play this game, but Mary knows how to butter her bread.
I parked in front of the Upscale Realty storefront off the boulevard and walked in. Not a very upscale place, just rows of desks, bulletin boards full of listings, files stacked atop filing cabinets. The place was a disaster, and how they managed to keep their properties straight I could never imagine. All the agents were out except Mary.
“Mary—how are you today!” I approached the woman at the desk in the rear. She looked over her reading glasses at me.
“Ooo. Morty. Good. How did it go?” She struggled to her feet. Regrettably, Mary was not a small woman, and gravity was taking its toll on her knees. I tried not to look at her legs beneath her shorts—fat hung down on them, and they were dimpled and veiny and generally made one consider giving up eating meat. Lord knew what the rest of her looked like under the T-shirt, and let the Lord be the only one. An elaborate eyeglass chain hung around her neck, and she let her glasses fall to her waist, right about where her breasts ended.
“It went well.”
“So I hear,” she said, gasping from the exertion of just standing. Her sweaty eyes beheld me mischievously from under her bushy eyebrows.
I had hoped that maybe, just maybe, the rumors had not reached her. Why? Because it was also my custom to “tip” her if I found tight ones. As a businessman, I have to grease the wheels of industry to make them turn in my favor. So I was ready.
“There was some extra.” She took the envelope from my hand and peered inside at the cash bonus—ten one-hundred-dollar bills—and ten percent check covering her cut.
Mary grunted with satisfaction. “Nice.”
“But not as nice as rumor may have it. At Oscar’s last night they told me I had scored a hundred tight ones. Crazy. The workers got drunk after I paid them and they exaggerated. You know how it is.”
She smirked. “So how many were there?”
I put a hand on her shoulder and laughed softly. “How long have we been friends?”
Chuckling, she said, “Long enough to know you’d never tell me the truth, were it one or fifty. Was it fifty?”
I put a hand on my heart. “I can honestly say it was not fifty.”
“More?”
“Or less.” I shrugged. “I have profited, and you have profited, yes?”
“Yes.” Waddling back to her desk, she heaved into her poor chair, unlocked a desk drawer, and placed a strongbox on the desk. From a string around her neck she took a key that had been nestled in her bosom and unlocked the box. Flipping through a pile of paper, she found a check and handed it up to me. Then she dropped the envelope I gave her into the box and returned it to the drawer.
I glanced at the check for accuracy, folded it, and slid it into my wallet.
“Look, Morty, youse better be careful.” Her look was ominous, and I wasn’t sure if it was because she did not feel well or it was genuine concern.
I merely cocked an eyebrow, awaiting an explanation.
“If youse found the mother lode, the Prick’ll be after you, know what I mean? I hear he’s got his panties in a twist over this.”
“Do I begrudge him when he finds good fortune? Besides, what is he really going to do?”
“You don’t have it in your apartment, do you?”
“I never keep accounts anyplace but in the bank or somewhere safe. Not good business.”
“Because I’ll bet he’s going to toss your place.”
“Mary, I am counting on him doing just that. I didn’t fasten the top lock before I left to make it easier for the Balkan Boys to get in. There’s nothing there for them to find. And when they do not find what they are looking for, what will they do? Capture and torture me, try to make me talk? Pete is a prick, to be sure, but I really do not think he would go that far. Do you?”
“So you did find the mother lode.”
“Mary, my friend, it does not matter if I did or did not. What matters is that there is a rumor that I did. They will believe the rumor—not me. So what can I do? I can let them look.”
“And your car?”
“Nothing there, either. I will leave it unlocked until this rumor dies.”
Mary grumbled something I couldn’t hear and then added, “Well, be careful, willyah? I hate to see bad things happen to good people.”
“I am taking all precautions.”
“Ooo.” She began rummaging through a pile of paper. “Where the hell did it get to? The guy was just here this morning.”
“Who was here?”
“Some guy. Like a cop, you know?”
“Like a cop?”
“He smelled of cop. Or a detective. He was looking for a guy.”
“I don’t understand. What has this to do with me?”
“He was asking about the house you cleaned on Vanderhoosen.”
I put a thoughtful hand to my chin. “Yes?”
“Yes. He wanted to know if somebody had come around asking about the owner of the house. Aha.” She slid a crumpled piece of paper at me. “He said he’d reward anybody who could help him find this guy. Did anybody like that come by the house while you were cleaning it?”
“You didn’t tell him I was the—”
“What? Am I an idiot? If you have seen the guy, I want ten percent of this reward.”
It was a photocopy, with a grainy mug shot of a dark-haired young man. Below was a full description—height, weight, age—but no name. “It says this man is my age, thirty-three. This picture does not look like—”
“Morty, didja see him or din’t you?”
I shook my head. “Nobody came by as we were cleaning.”
“Sure?”
“Positive.” The man I saw stan
ding in front of the house on Vanderhoosen Drive was not eighteen years old and did not look like the mug shot to me. I had no reason to connect the two.
Mary looked unhappy.
“You could ask Frog. He was working in the neighborhood, at the place next door. Maybe he saw this man, and you could get the ten percent from him?”
“Hmm. Long shot, but . . .”
“Worth a try. Look, I better be going. We haven’t seen you over at Oscar’s. I owe you a drink.”
“A drink? Probably a hundred drinks is what you owe me, Morty, you lucky bastard. Get out of here.”
As I went out the door I heard her call after me, “And for Christ’s sake, be fucking careful, willyah? I hate to see bad things happen to good people.”
CHAPTER
TEN
IT COULD NOT HAVE BEEN long after I left when Danny walked into Upscale Realty. Mary was still alone. It was maybe ten in the morning.
She probably smiled at him—she liked the tall, dark, handsome ones, like me, like Danny.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Yes, thank you. I’m interested in the house on Vanderhoosen Street.”
“You have good timing, my friend.” Mary would have struggled to her feet, her glasses dropping to her belly. She was not comfortable talking to people sitting down, especially potential clients. “We just cleaned it out and put the sign up yesterday.”
“Cleaned out, huhn? Not moved?”
“Died a month or so back. People pile up a lot of stuff in a lifetime, kids can’t take it all in, so the rest has to be cleaned out. Would you like me to have one of our agents show you the place?”
“Any available now? I was just passing by, not sure when I’ll be back around here.”
“Ooo.” I can picture Mary chewing a lip in thought. “Let me see if I can raise one.”
“Or if I could have the key, I could just take a look myself, and if I’m, you know, interested, I’ll come back for another look.”
“Well, we wouldn’t want you to miss any of the features of the house.”
“There’s nothing to steal, right? Promise I’ll bring the key back. Just around the corner.”
“We trust you, it’s not that . . . my name is Mary, by the way.”
“Tom.”
“Let me find the key . . .”
He watched as she tugged the keys from her boobs and opened a cabinet on the wall next to her desk. Then she fumbled with the ornamental chain around her neck and got her glasses on her face so she could read the little labels. The inside of the key box, like the rest of the place, was a mess.
“If you’ll just bear with me, Tom, there are a lot of keys . . .”
The flyer with Danny’s picture was probably still on the top of her desk, staring up at her, while he stared at her from across the room. I had not recognized him from the mug shot, so it is not a surprise that Mary did not, either. The mug shot showed a man in an open-necked white shirt with a look of restrained panic slapped onto his face. The customer in the turtleneck was cool and polite and fifteen years older.
“Can I help?” Danny approached, hands folded behind his back, the ice picks up his sleeves pressing into his forearms. He stood next to her, both of them squinting into the box, while his own mug shot looked up at them from the desk. I guess with all the rest of the stuff strewn on the desk, he might have been hard-pressed to pick it out from the rest of the papers, but the image was a familiar one. Too familiar.
Danny was unable to read anything on the scribbled tags in the key box and so turned away. He was probably thinking he might as well just bust into the place on his own and look around. Scanning the premises of Upscale Realty, he was probably not reassured that she would ever find the key. He began to notice that there were keys dotted all over the place. On a stack of files on the desk, in an empty coffee cup on a desk, in an ashtray on a desk over there, hanging from a clip on the edge of a lamp shade. Even her desk . . .
“Ooo!” Mary came up with the key and plunked down in her chair with a gasp. “Now, let me just get your name and number.” She found a pad of paper and dropped it on top of his mug shot.
“Tom Roberts.” He had heard many times in prison that the best aliases were a combination of two first names. People had a hard time remembering them, got the names mixed up. Then he gave her the phone number of where he grew up.
She stared at the number. “So you live not far from here?”
“Excuse me?”
“This exchange, it’s local.”
She held up the pad, pointing the pen at the number. “It’s a local exchange.”
Danny blinked. He realized that he was behind on popular technologies, so lying about things having to do with phones made him nervous. As he looked at the pad in her hand, beyond it would have been his mug shot. Now he was looking directly into his own eyes from fifteen years before—but his eyes shifted and focused on Mary’s instead of his own.
“That’s for messages,” he blurted.
“Oh, a message service.”
“A message service.” He nodded a little uncertainly. Even though they existed before he went to prison, he did not really know what a message service was.
“OK, well, here’s the key. Back here within the hour? I don’t want to have to call the police.”
Danny froze, key dangling from his hand.
She looked up at him, focusing on his face, noticing the restrained panic.
“Tom, I’m just joking. I trust you. You have an honest face.” People usually say that sort of thing when they aren’t sure, and by way of warning.
“Right.” Danny exhaled and tried to smile. Those smiling muscles hadn’t been exercised in a long time, so it was more of a lopsided grin. “I’ll be back soon with the keys.”
“If nobody is here, just drop them in the mail slot in the front door.”
“Thank you.” He headed for the exit, his hand adjusting the meat hammer in his belt.
Mary looked for someplace to put his name and address, muttering to herself about the mess, and picked up the mug shot to put it somewhere. Suddenly it hit her.
“Ooo! Tom!”
He stood in the open doorway and looked back across the room at her.
“Yes, Mary?”
“You may have to jiggle the lock and give the door a shove.”
“Thank you.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
WHILE DANNY WAS GETTING THE key to the place on Vanderhoosen from Mary, I was depositing the check she gave me at the neighborhood Ponce de León bank. Yes, believe it or not, Father, we have banks in New York with this name. The storage place was not far away, and I was tempted to go visit my money. It was still hard to believe, and I wanted to refresh my mind to the fact that I was now almost rich. Let us be brutally honest: You would have a hard time finding someone who did not enjoy looking at a big pile of cash that belonged to them.
As Mary suggested, though, I had to be careful. Very careful. Perhaps I was being followed, and I did not want to lead them to the cash. What worried me even more was what to do with the key to the locker. It had a bright orange plastic handle with the number of the locker on it and the name of the storage place. I had been keeping it temporarily under the floor mat in the rear of my car, but as I said before, I was not comfortable leaving things in my car, knowing that it was likely to be searched—even as I hoped that the Prick was searching my apartment at that moment, getting it over with.
I considered burying the key in the park, or putting it in a tree. But what if the grounds workers somehow stumbled upon it?
After much thought, I decided to hide it in plain sight and to remove the plastic handle. In the parking lot of a White Castle, I found a hammer in my trunk and smashed the orange plastic, reducing the key to just an ordinary-looking key. I slid this key onto my key ring between my car keys and apartment keys. I was sure the people at the storage place would not be happy with my decision to alter their key. Considering the options,
though, I did not really care—let them charge me twenty bucks for my wanton destruction of their key. If someone stole my keys, they would have no idea where in Brooklyn to look for the locker, if they even thought that I had a locker.
The paperwork for the locker was another matter. If I threw it away, I would have no backup in case the key were lost, and if someone found the rental agreement, they would know which locker to bust into. So I slid it into a sandwich bag and placed it under the battery in my car. This is an old trick from my foreman, Speedy. His father in Central America somewhere used to keep the family’s meager savings under the battery of a Ford Fairlane.
My mind turned toward more pleasant thoughts: Fanny. Ah, what a gem, and to stumble upon her the same day I discovered the thirty-two tight ones.
You may be wondering just how I felt about her—was love, marriage, and domestic glee a shimmering mirage in the distance?
I will tell you, the thought had crossed my mind. She was beautiful and, with a little gentle encouragement and training in certain departments, a superb lover. Fanny certainly had all the right parts in the right places, but Fanny posed a complication as well as a delight. How she would fit in with my plans . . . it was early yet. You see, now that my ship had come in, I felt I had sufficient resources to realize my dream of moving away from Brooklyn, of leaving the feeler business.
As I was in this frame of mind, I left the White Castle parking lot and drove to the library to go online.
I guess you would have to say that my dream to move away came from my father. He claimed that we were descended from the conquistadors who founded La Paz, where you are, Father, on the Baja peninsula. He told me he was raised there, and he would tell me stories of this tropical paradise, of the cool breezes, blue waters, majestic mountains, and the beautiful hacienda where he grew up. His stated mission in life was to buy that hacienda—Casa Martinez—and regain what he called “our birthright.” I remember asking him what that meant, and he said that as the descendants of conquistadors, we come from noble blood that does not thin through generations and is bound to history, and thus to certain places, like Casa Martinez.
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