by Marge Piercy
Lou wanted their attention. “Listen, you have to believe me. You have to make Jay Jay back me up. He knows I wasn’t there. Walker was only paying two hundred. What do you get for two hundred? Some stupid kid who doesn’t know the first thing about a successful set. He was supposed to arrange a little fire to scare out the tenants, just some smoke and water damage basically, so Walker could clear it and then rehab it for three condos. Instead he burned up himself and that little kid. Walker had to put in a whole new kitchen on the third floor and the second floor people never moved.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Jay Jay said. “I just helped him carry the cans of gas. He got it on himself and he went up all at once. I didn’t know what to do. He was screaming and the hall was burning. I didn’t know what to do! I ran downstairs and then I pulled the fire alarm. I didn’t know what else to do,” Jay Jay kept repeating. “I didn’t know!”
“Did you get paid by Walker or by Eduardo?” Bloomberg asked.
“By Mr. Walker. Eduardo brought me along to Saks by Walker’s office and we met in the ties deparment. Mr. Walker, he was mad at Eduardo for bringing me. But Eduardo, see, he didn’t want to pay me out of his money. He wanted Mr. Walker to pay me because he needed help carrying the stuff up. Also, like, he was a little scared. We practiced in a vacant lot, but that’s different.”
“I bet it is. You practiced setting fire to something?”
“Just a pile of junk. We went over to J.P.—Jamaica Plain—where we seen on the news there’s been all these fires getting people out on the Orange Line. So we thought we could practice there. But these guys came up and asked us who we were and what we were doing in their neighborhood, and they kept following us. So we gave up and just burned that junk.”
Bloomberg looked as if he wanted to groan. “Did Walker actually pay you?”
“He gave me twenty-five and he gave Eduardo a hundred. We were supposed to get the rest after.”
“Did you ever receive the rest of what he owed you?”
“I was supposed to get fifty. That’s what Eduardo promised and he talked Mr. Walker into it when we met at Saks in the ties. I stole a tie while they were arguing. Blue with dots and stuff. See, I’m telling you everything.”
Bloomberg roared on with his massive patience. “Did Walker ever pay you the second twenty-five?”
“I was too scared to go to him afterward. Then I needed the money so bad I called him. He just hung up on me. At the office they’d say who is this calling and I was scared to give my name. I figured I’d never get the money. Besides, we didn’t do it the way we were supposed to, and I figured Mr. Walker, he was mad at us about that.”
“Okay, Jay Jay. Now Mr. Dorsey is going to take you in the next room and he’s going to read you your rights and arrange about a lawyer and we’re going to write down your statement. You just say everything you just told us and anything else you can remember. Just start at the beginning and go through it. You give us the help we need, and there’s nothing to be scared of.”
After Dorsey had taken Jay Jay out, Orlando cleared his throat diffidently, “Hey, what can they do to him? I mean, he’s not all there. Eduardo felt sorry for Jay Jay for getting picked on all the time. He’s a retard.”
“He may be a little slow, but I think he’s mentally competent.” Bloomberg washed his hands together with a happy noise. “I think we just sewed up another of them. If you can come through with Porfirio tomorrow, Lou, I think we’ve got some reasonable cases.
“But you’re not going to pin that little Bobbie mess on me.”
“Never, Lou, never,” Bloomberg roared. “You’re our star witness. You’re our sweetheart. You didn’t know the kid would prove to have butterfingers. So after that they decided to pay for a professional?”
“Right. It scared the shit out of them, excuse me. That was late September. Walker comes to me and says, We need you, so what’s your price? I’d done a little job or two for Tony—we practically live in the same neighborhood—so with us all being fellow property owners in the same bailiwick, it was natural for them to turn to me, once they got it together to pay a reasonable price.
“Lou, I’m going to give you some protection. We’re going to be moving rather fast.”
“I don’t need protection.”
“I think you do. I noticed you’ve put two of your buildings on the market. I don’t want you to be thinking about a long vacation. You’re our main man, Lou, and without you, no case. I believe it’s time to start putting it all together. What I’m asking of you folks is that you lie low. No press conferences. No big meetings. No more amateur detective work. We’ve taken this over now and we’re moving on it, and if you try anything ambitious, you’re going to get in our way.”
SON adjourned to Fay’s kitchen to hold a postmortem over deli takeout, nobody quite able to go back to their day’s work after the excitement of the morning. Orlando was simply delaying the visit to Sylvia’s parents, but he and Sylvia were sitting side by side, as close as two kitchen chairs could be placed. Sylvia had been crying but she was also obviously happy, a balance that made her look brilliantly liquid, as if about to overflow with one or another emotion. Orlando looked serious and proud of himself.
Mac was slumped, button-down shirt unbuttoned and jacket hung crooked on the back of a kitchen chair, saying in dejection, “I thought Lou was completely frank and open with me. That he never shared what he knew about that fire is a shock. I thought we had a full, open, trusting relationship.”
“I dare say he’s more open with you than with his wife.” Daria said gently. “You mustn’t expect miracles. He told you he didn’t set that one, and it turns out he didn’t.”
“There was so much pressure on my brother,” Sylvia said. “He wanted to be a success, and he couldn’t even find a job. He’d been out of high school two years and he couldn’t get work. He just wanted to support himself.”
“I’m glad the Rosario family moved out of the neighborhood,” Orlando said. “They might take it out on us.” He and Sylvia were suddenly an us, Daria noted. Eduardo was his posthumous brother-in-law.
Tom helped himself to a beer. “I felt like a pariah this morning. Bloomberg would rather arrest me than the landlords. Charge: interfering with the addiction of an officer of the law. Anyhow, it’s kiss off and good-bye, now.”
Mac frowned. “They still need us.”
“Do they?” Tom raised his brows mockingly. “They need Jay Jay. They need Lou. They may even need Daria. But the rest of us are on the shelf. Elections coming up. The AG belongs to a different faction from the governor.”
“You give up too easily.” Mac put his feet up on the table, leaning way back. “I say we’ll still be cut in for a piece of the action.”
Fay barked, “Get your big dirty feet off my kitchen table, Mac. A piece of the action! We’re back to the comic books. Personally I’ll be overjoyed to get out of the detective business. We have a lot of problems, and if we knock out arson, that’s just one off the list. On to code violations. Trash. The deterioration of our park. Safety on the streets. Evictions. Roaches.”
“We gave them their case,” Mac mused. “We handed it to them on a platter. If they don’t give us credit, we’ll take our story to the media.”
“Who wants credit—” Tom began.
“Yeah, give me cash any day.” Fay crunched a pickle. “All we ever wanted was for the laws to be enforced against them too.”
Tom smiled at Daria. “People around here know what we’ve been trying to do. I’d like more time to myself. We’re going to be taking an apprentice into Aardvark and I’ll have to be doing a lot of training.”
“An apprentice?” Fay leaned forward, tapping his arm. “How about Johnny?”
“He’s too young, Fay. This won’t be a summer job.”
Orlando was staring at Tom. “You got somebody for the job?”
Tom grinned. “I was thinking of Sylvia. I talked to her already.”
Sylvia nodded.
/> “But she wants to be a nurse.”
“Not anymore,” Orlando said sourly.
Sylvia burst out: “Tom says we can still manage it. I’d make good money as a nurse. I talked to Eleni.”
“I was thinking of you,” Tom said to Orlando. “Interested?”
“Interested, man, interested? That’s a joke. You want me to crawl and beg and have Masses said for it? You know they have me working in the store when there’s no real need, just to give me some kind of job. But that’s my bro Boz’s, the store.” Orlando looked hard and long at Tom. “Just when did you decide about this job?”
“I was considering it.” Tom looked steadily back.
“’Cause I’m going to do right by Sylvia and her family, huh?”
“You’ll make a good carpenter. Don’t you think so?”
“I always finish what I start,” Orlando said portentously. He was still brooding. “I guess it was fair. But I didn’t even know you were thinking along those lines, man.”
“Just as well,” Fay said. “You make a success of it, and maybe when Johnny’s ready, Aardvark will take him on too.”
“I don’t want to.” Johnny spoke from the floor where he was eating a sandwich beside his ghetto box. “I’m going to form my own group. Bandido and I been practicing and I wrote my first song.”
“How does it go?” Sylvia asked.
“It isn’t really finished yet, but it’s got a great beginning,” Johnny said with satisfaction. He stood up abruptly and belted out in his cracking voice:
“You left me all ay-lone, you left me flat.
You sent me spinning, you knocked me off my feet.
Now you’re running with another pack.
You left me like a dead dog in the street!
That’s as far as I got.”
“Beautiful,” Fay said. “A love song, huh? It’s real moving.”
“I like it,” Sylvia said. “I feel like that sometimes. You go work on it some more.”
Orlando stood. “Time for us to pay a call on your mother.”
Sylvia put her hands over her eyes. “She’s going to take this hard.… You know, if a job like Tom’s giving you had ever come through for Eduardo, he’d never have got mixed up with Walker.” She followed him out.
Mac said reminiscently, tilting way back in his chair but leaving his feet off the table, “I recall wanting to be a rock star when I was in high school. I used to practice in the mirror.”
“What happened?” Johnny asked. “How come you gave up?”
“I had all the right moves. The right faces. But I couldn’t sing worth a damn. Even my own girlfriend couldn’t stand listening to me.” Mac sighed.
“A depressing story,” Tom said. “So you gave up your dreams of glory and settled for Harvard.”
“Politics is interesting up close,” Mac said. “I expected to find it boring. I’ll admit you’re likely correct about the AG’s motives, but I don’t see how that necessarily excludes us.”
“Oh yeah?” Fay rose and started clearing. “What are you going to run for?”
“Who knows?” Mac beamed. “There’s a crude side to it, certainly, but I don’t see that city politics should be harder to play than departmental politics. Bloomberg’s bright, if a bit crude. I could learn something from him. I have everything I need for my thesis, but I can imagine an interesting study.…”
When Daria walked in to her house, the phone was ringing.
“Daria, listen, it’s Gloria. Am I interrupting something?”
“Just arrived myself, actually. How are you, Gloria? Is everything all right?” The first thing she imagined was that Tony was not paying his child support.
“I just had the weirdest, I do mean weirdest phone call from your brother.”
Since the divorce, Gloria referred to Tony in that manner.
This time Daria asked, to make sure, “Tony? Or Cesaro?”
“I will say Cesaro hasn’t forgotten a Christmas or a birthday present for the kids. No, I mean Tony.”
“What did he want?”
“He had this completely nutsola notion that I had moved in with you. He’d been trying to get ahold of me. Of course if he ever bothered exercising his visiting privileges with his own flesh and blood, he’d know where we’re living. You’d think he’d notice it from the checks, but I guess his secretary mails them out.”
“He thought we were living together?” Daria repeated, trying to keep herself from sounding amused.
“I don’t know where he got such an idiot idea, believe me! Obviously he hasn’t been in any closer touch with you than he has with me.”
“I haven’t had a conversation with Tony since Ross walked out. He took Ross’s side. They’re very thick.”
“Cesaro told me and I’m so sorry. After all those years. And the two of you always seemed so solid. But Tony almost drove me crazy today. Honestly, it reminded me of when we were first together and he used to get jealous every time we went out in public together.”
“What on earth did Tony want?”
“To ask a million stupid questions. None of them made sense.”
“Well, like what? This is awfully mysterious.”
“He kept asking about some group called the sons of something or other. The Sons of Allston, you know, like the Sons of Italy. And somebody who made me think of the Lone Ranger. Let me think. It was somebody Silver. He’s absolutely gonzoed at Cesaro, by the way.”
“Is he? Did he say why?”
“Something about insurance. You know those guys. But, Daria, it was the most ridiculous conversation. He hasn’t spoken to me since Christmas! Now all he wanted to talk about was a bunch of people I’d never heard of and he kept saying I’d been living with you and why was I pretending I didn’t know.”
“Poor Gloria! You must have been upset.”
“And then how Cesaro was screwing him—I’m quoting. Then he started bellowing in my ear about all the people who owe him favors and how we wouldn’t succeed in bringing him down. What I want to know is, what’s going on with him? Is Tony crazy?”
“If Tony calls you again, tell him to talk directly to me.”
“But do you know what it’s all about?”
“Vaguely. It has something to do with real estate.”
“But, Daria, neither you nor me ever knew beans about that stuff. He got so angry at me he hung up.
“Why’d he get angry?”
“He kept asking all these questions and he wouldn’t believe me when I tried to explain I didn’t know what he was talking about. He kept saying you and Cesaro were out to get him. But that a lot of people owed him favors.”
After Gloria hung up Daria felt apprehensive enough to call Bloomberg. It sounded as if Tony might be suspicious. Bloomberg was not in the office, but Dorsey assured her they were moving fast indeed.
30
A secret grand jury had been impaneled. Daria testified on a hot muggy Tuesday the last week in June. Since this was not a trial, the procedure was simpler than she had expected.
Sandra María was on next with her charts on window shades and her graphs of neighborhood ownership, mortgage patterns and the incidence of fires. They both came home on the Green Line together to a dinner Tracy had volunteered to prepare. Tracy was working at a day camp for city children, doing simple music, drawing, storytelling. She had begun with great enthusiasm but was already growing a little tired of the massive babysitting operation on a low budget for sports and art supplies.
Scott ate with them. Afterward he and Tracy went out, and Sandra María and Daria cleaned up. Sandra María was ready to rehash the day’s events in court, but Daria’s attention was elsewhere. Scott was blond and rugged, except for a receding chin. Both his parents were in marketing research and lived in Ipswich. He did not have a summer job and every week he seemed a more leathery mahogany, his hair whiter, from six hours a day at the beach. “What does she see in him?” she demanded of Sandra María.
“Well, he’s got
a car and he’s always available. He seems innocuous.”
“I’m worried about her.” Daria finished loading the dishwasher. “She’s on the pill.”
“I would hope so. We don’t want any more births around here.”
“That means she’s sleeping with that bronzed coatrack. I’ll wash.”
Sandra María cocked her head. “She’s not in love with him, I don’t think.” She picked up a dry towel.
“Then why?”
“What did she tell you?”
Daria fished around in the sudsy water for a knife she had just lost. “She didn’t. I saw the pills on her dresser when I was cleaning her room.”
“Daria! You just shocked me.”
“Why?”
“Why are you cleaning her room?”
“I always clean it.”
“Isn’t she old enough to clean her own room?” Sandra María asked gently.
“She does, she does, but not as thoroughly as it ought to be.”
“Daria, at her age you shouldn’t be going into her room unless she asks you in. You know that!”
She wanted to lash out at Sandra María. She kept her back turned, scrubbing a frying pan as hard as she could with steel wool. She knew she was scratching the finish.
“Look at me. Daria …”
“Let’s see how well you’ll do when it’s Mariela on the pill screwing somebody she shouldn’t bother with!”
“You know you oughtn’t to have been snooping. How lucky you are to have me as your private family therapist. Now look at me again, please.”
Finally Daria turned, feeling she had been pouting. “I know I was being nosy, okay?”
The grand jury heard testimony all week and into the next. On Sunday Robin came to play softball. It had become her ritual, that she appeared Sunday morning and stayed till evening. The occasional softball games of previous years had solidified around Tom, Ángel and Robin and were now a regular feature of any Sunday when it didn’t pour. Then Robin returned to the house for supper. If they were all going to a movie, she went; if they were hanging around the house, she hung with them, until midevening, when she would return to her Back Bay apartment.