Sweetheart

by Andrew Coburn

“Deposit it,” he said.

  • • •

  He drove back to the Howard Johnson’s hotel and left the car in the underground garage and then, tightening his overcoat, walked the few blocks to the Combat Zone, where he jockeyed his way through the motley crowd on narrow Washington Street and eyed the gaudy arcades, movie houses, smut shops, and girlie joints. Despite the cold, the air was carnival. Bare-legged prostitutes, some underage, all insensible to the weather, tossed out smiles like peanuts to pigeons. A small band of pimps, tall fur or felt hats a part of their regalia, filed into a lounge as if for a meeting; the last to enter gave Wade a curt glance. Wade went farther up the street and entered a joint he knew Anthony Gardella had a piece of.

  It was one of the busiest, perhaps the loudest, with a succession of three circular bars, each with a miniature stage where a young woman gyrated to music too electronic for Wade, too ear-shattering, too crushing to his nerves. Yet he stayed. He found a seat at the second bar and wedged himself in between two black men, who gave him furtive looks without moving their heads. The stripper noticed his arrival and welcomed it with a sudden thrust. She had milk-white skin and a smattering of stretch marks on an otherwise fine belly. Wade drank bottled beer.

  He was on his second bottle when the man on his right picked up his cigarettes and left, which gave him room to relax his shoulders. Twice, from the corner of his eye, he spotted someone from the Gardella organization. Their pictures were among those in a file Thurston had given him. Mostly they were watching the tills, occasionally the strippers. He retracted an elbow when a young black woman perched herself on the vacated chair and smiled at him through gilded eyelids and dangling cornrow braids. She said something he couldn’t hear over the music. Then suddenly her breath was in his ear. “Hey, you a cop? People here saying you’re a cop.”

  He leaned toward her. “Yes, I’m a cop, but don’t worry about it. I’m here to relax. Buy you a drink?”

  “Sure,” she said and touched his hand by way of thanks, her nails sparkling. “But we can’t hear each other here. Why don’t we go to a booth?”

  His beer bottle was only half-empty, and he took it with him. She led the way into almost total darkness. Though it was impossible to see, the booths all seemed occupied, but she found one free down at the end and stepped aside for him to slip in first. Then she crowded in on the same side as he sat at an angle, his back to the wall. He could not see her face, only her eyes and teeth.

  “We’ll wait a second, okay?”

  “Wait for what?” he asked as someone leaned into the booth. A full bottle was deposited near his half-empty one. He knew it was there by touching it, and he knew something was there for her. It glistened.

  She said, “You sure you’re not here to bust people?”

  “I give you my word.”

  “How much you want to relax?” she asked and let her hand fall into his lap. “I can do some awful nice things for you right here. Depending on what you want is what it’ll cost.”

  “I want so much,” he said in a low voice, “here wouldn’t do.”

  “We can go someplace, three-minute walk.”

  Wade shook his head. His eyes had adjusted, and he could see more of her. “Not tonight. Another night. Tonight I’m hurting, carrying too much inside me.”

  “What kind of problems you got?”

  “Wife problems. Wife’s two-timing me.”

  The young woman’s teeth flashed. “There’s a way to fix that, you two-time her, that way you come out even and both be happy again. What you think of that, huh?”

  “I think you’ve got it all together, I just wish that I did.” Somebody was passing by the booth. He could not see who it was, but he sensed it was a man. “This is worth money to you, listening to me talk.”

  “I get all kinds,” she said.

  “I’m sure.”

  Before he left, he slipped a ten-dollar bill onto the table for the drinks and pressed a larger denomination into her hand. She looked at it with the eyes of a lynx and whispered, “You’re an all-right guy.”

  On his way out, letting his shoulders droop, he glimpsed Gardella’s people. Their eyes burned into his back, which had been his purpose. He knew that everything he had told the young woman would be repeated.

  • • •

  Victor Scandura leaned over a cup of cappuccino inside the Caffè Pompei, his elbows on the tiny table, his glasses off. His eyes, flyspecks, seemed blind. He said to Augie, “I’ve got to ask you something, be nice you answer me straight. What are you on?”

  Augie made a face. “What you talking about?”

  “You’d better tell me,” Scandura said and rubbed the pinch marks on his nose. “Anthony wants to know.”

  Augie wrestled with something inside himself and finally said, “So I pop a little, what’s the harm? I got a lot of scores behind me. The Skelly warehouse job was mine, so was the meat truck on Route One.”

  “You pop. What do you pop?”

  “Uppers, okay? Now and then.”

  “You ask the harm, I’ll tell you. You didn’t perform well in Greenwood. Ralph wasn’t there, I don’t know what would have happened. You understand what I’m saying? You dirty yourself on junk, you’re dangerous to us. It wasn’t for Anthony’s regard for your uncle, I wouldn’t be talking to you. You wouldn’t be here.”

  Augie’s chinless face, already pale, went white. He tried to lift his cup of cappuccino, but his hand shook too much. “You don’t have to worry about me, I understand.”

  “You make a mistake in these things,” Scandura said evenly, “a lot of people have to pay. No more pills.”

  “I promise. You tell Anthony I swear. Okay?”

  “Sure.” Scandura fitted his glasses back onto his face. “Now get out of here.”

  • • •

  Rita O’Dea descended the stairs bound in a big robe, her face moist and bright from her bath. She called out for Alvaro and found him in the kitchen, where he had made himself a fruit drink in the blender and was pouring it into a tall glass. Her gaze narrowed in on him. “Who was that you were talking to on the phone?”

  “It was nobody,” he said. “It was somebody asking if we wanted to buy a bunch of light bulbs for handicapped people. I told them we’ve got plenty of light bulbs, more than we can use.”

  “Don’t give me that crap. Who was it?”

  The drink he had made for himself contained banana, pineapple, nutmeg, vanilla syrup, and skim milk. He took a long taste of it and said, “Delicious.”

  She said, “Was it from Miami? Was it a woman?”

  “One woman at a time, Rita. That’s my rule.”

  “That’s a good rule. You break it, I’ll break you.”

  “Hey,” Alvaro said with a handsome smile, “you’re forgetting something. I love you.”

  “Yeah, I love you too,” she said with no change of expression on her face. “C’mere and give me a kiss.”

  • • •

  Inside one of the lusher residences on Key Biscayne, Anthony Gardella sat in air-conditioned comfort and sipped coffee brewed from choice blends. The host was Sal Nardozza, his contemporary and a cousin twice or thrice removed. Perched open on a marble table was a black-and-chrome briefcase overstacked with money, fifties and hundreds, half to be washed through a Miami bank and half to broker a cocaine transaction, the clients Cuban and Colombian. Earlier a third man had slipped quietly into the room to count the bills so that later there would be no misunderstanding. He had also shown Gardella a balance sheet, which Gardella had perused with the trained eye of an accountant and then returned without comment.

  Now that their business was done, Nardozza lit a cheroot and sat back in his wicker chair. He was dressed casually, Florida-style, his shirt open to the silver floss on his chest. His voice was raspy. “I’m surprised you came down here yourself, but I’m glad you did. You’re staying for dinner, I hope. I’ll give you a good feed.”

  Gardella shook his head. “My wife’s waiting for
me at the hotel.”

  “Have her join us, why not? I had a wife like you got, I’d never leave her alone.”

  “We got reservations at a little place. Second honeymoon for us.”

  Nardozza grinned respectfully. “You’re a lucky guy, Anthony.”

  Gardella put his coffee cup down with care, centering it in the saucer. “There’s a Cuban calls himself Alvaro, used to dish out towels at the Sonesta. Check him out for me, will you?”

  “No problem. Anything else?”

  “How’s my brother-in-law doing?”

  “Ty? I guess he’s doing okay. I don’t hear nothing bad about him. He’s tied tight with that spic Miguel, but I guess you know that.”

  “Yes,” Gardella said, “I know that. What I don’t know is what Miguel wants with him.”

  “You want me to check on that too?”

  “No,” Gardella said. “My brother-in-law’s got a big mouth. He was up to something, you’d have heard.”

  Nardozza assumed a sober expression. “I never asked, but how did Rita ever get hooked up with him?”

  “Like she meets all her guys, Sal. She’s a lonely woman.”

  “She dropped fifty pounds, she’d be beautiful.”

  “Seventy-five’s more like it.”

  “She’s still beautiful. She was growing up I had a crush on her, you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “You give her my best, Anthony.”

  “I will,” Gardella said, rising.

  He rode back to his hotel in the car he had rented, Ralph Roselli at the wheel. Ralph Roselli carried two concealed handguns, one under his arm and the other inside his waistband. The weapons were also rented, from the same fellow who had given them the keys to the car. Ralph stayed in the lobby, and Gardella rode the elevator to the fifteenth floor. The door to his room was open, and Jane Gardella was waiting for him, vivid, chic, eye-filling, dressed to the nines. “We’re late,” she said.

  “They’ll hold the table,” he told her. “Let me look at you.”

  She turned one way and then another and said, “Do you approve?” The question was unnecessary.

  He said, “You make me feel ten times more important than I am.”

  They held hands in the elevator. When they stepped into the lobby, she saw Ralph and stopped short. “Tony, do we have to bring him with us?”

  “Yes,” Gardella said remotely. “For some funny reason I don’t feel right down here.”

  • • •

  From his room at the Howard Johnson’s, Christopher Wade punched out the private number of Russell Thurston. It was past midnight. After Wade identified himself, Thurston said, “I don’t mind you calling me at home, but not at this hour. I hope it’s important.”

  “You’ve got pull inside the state police. I mean, you’ve shown that, right? Who’s it with, the commissioner himself? Old FBI man.”

  “What do you want, Wade?”

  “Back in Greenwood there’s a trooper named Denton — big, lumbering kid — who should be promoted to corporal. Deserves it. Why don’t we see he gets it?”

  “Did I hear you right?”

  “It’s a legitimate request.”

  “The hell it is.”

  “It’s important to the kid, and I owe him.”

  Thurston sighed with annoyance. “What you’re asking is petty. It doesn’t make you look good, and it doesn’t make me look good, laying something like that on the commissioner.”

  “Are you telling me you can’t do it?”

  “Sure I can do it, but I’m not going to.”

  “Do it, Thurston. Make me happy.”

  Thurston was quiet for a moment. “I hope you’re not going to make this a habit.”

  “You have my word.” Wade cleared his throat. “As long as I’ve got you on the line, let me ask you something. Should I keep a list of my expenses or just give you a round figure each week?”

  “Each month. Yes, you list them. Wade, you trying to get my ass?”

  “Yes,” Wade said. “I find it a challenge. See you.”

  “Wait a minute.” There was the sound of Thurston shifting the receiver from one hand to the other. “I might as well tell you something I was saving for later. A rumble one of my people picked up, might not be anything to it.”

  “Go ahead,” Wade said. “I’m all ears.”

  “There may be a contract on Gardella.”

  Wade pressed a finger to his lips and then slowly let it fall away. “They’ll never hit him,” he said.

  Thurston said, “I’m betting on it.”

  6

  AGENT BLUE lived with his wife on the Cambridge Street side of Beacon Hill, a mere three-minute walk to the Kennedy Building. Massachusetts General Hospital, where his wife worked, was a minute closer. At the breakfast table he dawdled over his coffee, and she leafed through the Globe. Her eye passed over a half-column mug shot of a man and then swept back to the name under it. Pushing the paper to Blue, she said, “Isn’t this the guy you were telling me about?”

  The photo was of Lieutenant Christopher Wade, accompanied by a brief report of his reassignment from the detective division at the Lee barracks to the Suffolk County office of the district attorney, where “the twenty-year veteran of the state police will take up the duties of a special investigator, particularly in the area of organized crime.”

  Blue said, “I pity the bastard. Thurston will chew him up.”

  His wife took the paper back and studied the picture. “Not a bad face. I like the eyes.”

  Blue said, “Be better if they were in the back of his head.”

  “You going to help him?”

  “I don’t know if he’s worth it.”

  • • •

  The same report caught the notice of a mildly good-looking man at the offices of Benson Tours in Wellesley. He carried the newspaper into Susan Wade’s office and, with a vaguely apologetic air, waited until she got off the phone. Then, folding the paper to the article, he slid it across her desk. “Did you know about this?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, dropping back in her chair. He hovered.

  “What does it mean to us?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  He brightened and, stepping around the desk, thrust forward a long Yankee face with comfortable creases. He prided himself on a devotion to the finer things in life, intelligent and attractive women being among them. “What’s your schedule?” he asked, pronouncing “schedule” in the British way.

  “If you’re asking if I’m free for lunch, the answer’s yes.”

  • • •

  Anthony Gardella and Victor Scandura were also interested in the announcement of Christopher Wade’s reassignment. They were seated in the rear room of Gardella’s real estate office on Hanover Street, a block down from St. Leonard’s Church. Gardella read the item twice, the second time aloud to Scandura, who said, “I’m not all that surprised. The time I saw him he hinted he was working something. He must’ve known this was coming.”

  “Yet he did me a favor.”

  “In a way we did him one. We got rid of two crazies for him.”

  Gardella was quiet for a moment. “Two ways to figure him. He’s a regular guy. Or he’s cute. What do you think?”

  “I’m like you, Anthony. I always think the worst and work from there.”

  There were two leather chairs in the room, and Gardella was in the larger one. On a side table was a bag of Italian cookies bought fresh that morning from the bakery next door. Gardella ate one. “You don’t like him.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “This new job of his, Victor, it could mean heat for us.”

  “What can he do to us? Nothing.”

  “He can come on strong, or he can do it easy. I’d rather have him do it easy, wouldn’t you? What do we know about him?”

  “He’s got wife trouble, I know that. He was in one of our joints bleeding on one of the hookers.”

  “Let’s check on it, see
if it’s true,” Gardella said, interested. “Wrong woman can mess up a guy.”

  Scandura nodded. He was once married to a woman who allowed him his pleasure only on Fridays. Now he no longer felt the need. He crossed his legs, extending a shoe foxed along the sides and perforated on the toe. He said, “You’ve been quiet since you got back from Miami. Anything wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” Gardella was pensive. “I got bad feelings down there. My cousin Sal. I think he wants to make a move. I could be wrong, since I got nothing staring me in the face that says I’m right.”

  Scandura said ominously, “You’re seldom wrong, Anthony.”

  “I’ll tell you what it was,” Gardella said, reaching for another cookie. “Remember when my sister turned sixteen, and Sal, my age, had a hard-on for her?”

  “I remember you telling me about it.”

  “I was so mad I was going to clip him. Anyway, there we are sitting in his house in Biscayne, and he mentions how he used to like her. Can you imagine? He reminds me of it, like he’s not scared anymore.”

  “Maybe he forgot you were going to clip him over it.”

  “No. A guy never forgets something like that.”

  “That’s true,” Scandura agreed.

  “Nose around, Victor. I need to know.”

  • • •

  Christopher Wade’s new apartment was on the third floor of a venerable brick building on Commonwealth Avenue. It had a kitchenette, a bedroom, a good-sized bathroom, and an extra-large sitting room that opened onto a small balcony overlooking the tree-lined mall. The weather was mild, almost springlike, and Wade, perched on the balcony, imagined the trees exploding into leaf and birds winging to the balcony for the feed he’d provide, though the thought came to him that he’d only attract pigeons. When he stepped back into the sitting room he heard the person in the apartment above walk across the floor.

  He checked the telephone to see whether it was working. Boston University was in the vicinity, and he considered calling his daughters on the remote possibility of reaching one of them for lunch. Both lived in the same dormitory, Warren Towers, though in different rooms. He tried the older daughter’s number, no response, and then the younger daughter’s, same result. In his mind’s eye he tended to see them still as little girls in braids, which was the reason he was always jolted when they appeared in person as willowy young women with hard touches of sophistication, the older one majoring in child psychology, the younger in journalism. The telephone shrilled as he drifted away from it.