Bad Apple

by Anthony Bruno

  Gina’s secretary shrugged, the phone cradled on her shoulder as she called around the department store looking for her boss. She was a black girl in her twenties with one of those Buckwheat hairdos. She had an attitude when they first walked in, but the presence of four grown men with bad grammar and no place else to be in the middle of a weekday was making her a little uneasy. She was having a hard time looking Bells in the eye.

  The top floor of Macy’s humongous flagship store on Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan didn’t look like the rest of the store. It was full of offices and pretty drab ones at that, just like a regular old office building. Gina shared an office with another buyer, but neither of them was in right now. The secretary’s desk was out in the hallway.

  Tozzi, Freshy, and Stanley hung back as Bells did the talking. He stood there with his hands clasped behind his back, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, staring down at the secretary, always moving.

  The secretary dialed yet another extension and asked if Gina was there. She kept her eyes down, staring at her blotter, playing with her hair. Bells watched her like a cruel headmaster. He knew he was making her nervous, and Tozzi could tell from his face that he was enjoying it.

  “Is Ms. DeFresco down there?” she asked one more time. She glanced up at Bells, shook her head, and looked down again. “Have you seen her? . . . No? . . . Okay, thanks.”

  “No luck?” Bells tucked his chin in and puckered his lips.

  She spoke fast, not wanting to disappoint the creep. “No one’s seen her. Maybe she left for Hoboken already.”

  “Hoboken?”

  “Yeah. That’s where they make the floats for the parade. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? You know, with all those big balloons? The cartoon characters? The store has a big warehouse somewhere over in Hoboken.”

  Bells kept shifting his weight, back and forth. “Why would she be going over there?”

  “Well, she wasn’t supposed to leave until after lunch, but she’s got all these kids with her. They’re going to be in the parade tomorrow, on Santa’s float. Gina is supposed to take them over and show them what they’re supposed to do.”

  “So who are these kids?”

  She lowered her voice and rolled her eyes. “The bosses’ kids. Getting your kids on Santa’s float is one of the big perks around here.”

  “But if Gina isn’t supposed to go over to see the floats until after lunch, where the hell could she be with all these kids?”

  “Wherever they want to be. They’re the bosses’ kids.” She looked at her watch. “It’s almost lunchtime. Gina could be feeding them, either upstairs in the cafeteria or down in the Cellar. Or they could be somewhere on five in kids’ clothes. Or toys on eight. Maybe electronics on seven. I dunno. It’s a big store. And these kids get whatever the hell they want when they’re here.”

  “No kidding.” Bells’s voice softened. He sounded genuinely concerned about the young woman’s grievance.

  “Santa’s treat.” she said with a smirk. “Like they don’t have enough.” She didn’t seem so intimidated now that he was listening to her complaints.

  Bells crinkled his eyes and nodded at the phone. “Make a few more calls, would’ja? I’ll bet they’re still here.”

  The secretary shrugged. “All right.” But she didn’t sound hopeful. She pounded out another extension and asked if Gina was there.

  Tozzi noticed that Bells kept his hand in his jacket pocket. He was jingling that bracelet he took from Mr. Blake, the jeweler. Tozzi got the impression from the way he kept playing with it that he was anxious to give it to Gina. Tozzi hadn’t even been sure Bells had something going with Gina when he made believe he wanted to buy it for someone who loved purple, but now it seemed that he was right on the money about them. From what Tozzi could see, Bells had it pretty bad for Gina, and that was really pissing him off. Bells’s voice on her answering machine kept replaying through his head. He wondered if Gina felt as strongly for Bells, though. Maybe it was just a one-way thing. But maybe all that stuff she’d told Tozzi about not wanting anything to do with her brother’s wiseguy friends was a load. Maybe it was just her way of giving him the brush-off because she was already taken.

  The secretary nodded, said thanks, and hung up the phone. “Gina was in kids’ shoes on five about ten minutes ago, but she’s not there now. The kids are with her. You want me to have her paged? Is this an emergency or something?”

  Bells shook his head. “No, no, don’t have her paged. I don’t want to get her upset.” He glanced over his shoulder at Freshy. “Maybe she’ll think someone died.” He laughed, but no one joined in. That didn’t bother him. He turned back to the secretary and smiled at her. “If she’s in the store, we’ll find her. Thanks for your help.”

  Bells turned and spread his arms like a big bird of prey, ushering them all back down to the end of the hall to the bank of elevators. An oil portrait of old man Macy was on the opposite wall to greet people as they got off the elevator.

  Stanley looked at his watch. “Whatta’ya wanna do, Bells?”

  “We’ll split up and look for her. She’s in the store. She should be easy to spot if she’s baby-sitting a bunch of kids.”

  Tozzi and Freshy shrugged and said okay. They didn’t have much choice. It wasn’t like he was asking them to break some deadbeat’s leg. But in this instance, Tozzi might’ve rather done that than help Bells give Gina a gift that he had picked out because he’d genuinely thought she might like it.

  “What is it, a little after noon?” Bells asked.

  Stanley looked at his watch again. “Yup.”

  “Okay. Stanley, you come with me. We’ll start on the top floor and work down. Mikey, you and Freshy go down to the basement and work up. We’ll meet back here in what? Half an hour, forty-five minutes?”

  They all shrugged and nodded. Tozzi planned to get to a phone and call in to the field office as soon as he could. Maybe they could take Bells down in the store.

  Bells grinned at Tozzi. “Now, if you guys find her first, you just tell her I got a surprise for her and bring her back here, okay?”

  “Sure.” Tozzi nodded. Bells was really busting his balls now, but Tozzi didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of letting him think he was jealous. Even though he was.

  Bells pressed the down-button for the elevator. He was still grinning at Tozzi. “And don’t tell her what it is. Gina likes surprises.”

  Tozzi held his tongue and just nodded. How about you, Bells? he thought. You like surprises?

  “See? I told you she’d be here. She eats here all the time.” Freshy bounced as he cut through the circular racks of dresses and blouses on the fourth floor. Tucked away in a corner, there was a little snack bar done up like an ice cream parlor from the fifties. The girl who worked the counter wore a pink and black poodle skirt, and her blond hair was tied back in a high, tight ponytail. Gina was sitting in a booth with a bunch of kids—nine-and ten-year-olds, Tozzi guessed. They took up the only two booths in the snack bar.

  Tozzi followed Freshy through the racks. “If you knew your sister would be here, why didn’t you tell Bells?”

  Freshy gave him a look. “Would you want that friggin’ freak hanging around your sister?”

  The answer was obvious, but Tozzi pondered Freshy’s statement. Was Freshy implying that Bells had been hanging around with Gina? As in the past?

  Tozzi stopped and watched Gina and the kids from behind a rack of iridescent green parkas. They were flipping through the selections on the jukebox in the booth, arguing over what they wanted to hear. He didn’t like what he saw. He’d just made a quick call in to the field office and told them that Bells was in Macy’s and that he’d try to keep him here until an arrest team could get there. But if Bells found Gina and these kids, making an arrest would be too risky. Bells had to be isolated somehow. As Tozzi walked over toward the snack bar, he wondered how the hell he could do that. He’d have to go off and search the store for Bells. But he didn’t
want to leave Gina and the kids alone.

  As he moved closer to the snack bar, he saw that Gina had her finger in one boy’s face. “Jason, if you play Guns ’N Roses one more time, I’m gonna break your hand.”

  “Not if you like your job you won’t.” The kid had a face like a choirboy, but he wore a small gold hoop in one ear and a black wool baseball cap and had the kind of sneer that started fights.

  The older kids egged them on, congratulating Jason on “dissing Gina good.” Tozzi had to smile. He got a kick out of hearing middle-class white kids talking black. He’d love to leave someone like this Jason kid on 125th and St. Nicholas Avenue some night and see if he could communicate his way back to Scarsdale before he got his ass kicked good by the real brothers.

  The kid reached over and dropped a few quarters in the slot, then punched out his selections without even looking. The other kids started to hoot for Jason’s victory. The music started, and Axl Rose let out the pig squeal from hell. Jason leaned over the counter and sneered in Gina’s face. “Deal with it, babe.”

  Gina met his gaze with the Sicilian look of death. She glanced over at the poodle-skirt blonde, raised her arm, and pointed down at the jukebox. A moment later Axl was cut off in mid-squeal as the blonde pulled the plug and the jukebox went dead.

  She sneered into Jason’s face. “Deal with that, mega-turd.”

  The kids hooted louder. She’d dissed him better. Jason maintained his sneer, but he knew she’d got him and got him good. Little Bart Simpson was going down in flames. Tozzi grinned.

  “Hey, Gina, Gina.” Freshy walked up to the booth. “Where you been? We been looking for you?”

  One eyebrow rose over Gina’s purple glasses. She didn’t look too happy to see her little brother.

  “What’re you doing here?” When she noticed Tozzi, she glanced over at the innocent-looking girl with the long blond Alice-in-Wonderland hair sitting at the end of the booth, then smirked up at him. “You getting into kiddie porn now?”

  Tozzi just stared at her. He imagined her with Bells on her living-room couch. He wasn’t sure if he liked her so much anymore.

  “Bells is looking for you,” Freshy said. “C’mon. He’s got something for you.” Freshy sounded annoyed but resigned to his duty. He didn’t know the troops were on the way. He’d been in the bathroom when Tozzi had made the call.

  Gina’s eyes narrowed. “Bells is here?”

  She didn’t sound particularly upset. Of course, she didn’t sound very happy either. At least Tozzi didn’t think so.

  Freshy nodded like a horse. “Yeah. He’s here, he’s here. Why the hell else would we be here? To go shopping, for chrissake? Jeez.”

  Young Jason looked Freshy up and down. “Wouldn’t be a bad idea.” Freshy was wearing a shiny electric blue suit under his bone-white brushed wool topcoat.

  Freshy scowled and started to give the kid the finger when Gina caught his eye and changed his mind. The aborted gesture just ended up looking retarded with Freshy pulling on his ponytail in a lame attempt to save face. The kids all laughed.

  Gina laughed with them. She laughed like a little kid, with her eyes. She wasn’t laughing at Freshy so much as she was laughing with the kids, and in that instant Tozzi changed his mind about her again.

  Freshy waved his arms as if he were helping a truck back up. “C’mon, Gina, c’mon. Bells is gonna be waiting up by your office. Let him give you the thing so we can get outta here. Okay? C’mon.”

  Gina frowned. She held up her palms and looked at all the kids around her. “How? How can I leave?”

  “Mike’ll watch ’em. C’mon.”

  She glared up at Tozzi. “Like hell, he will.”

  Tozzi flashed his wiseguy grin. He was glad to see she wasn’t jumping to go get her surprise. He was also glad that she was staying put here with the kids so he could watch them. He’d decided it would be better to let the arrest team find Bells. They’d be armed.

  Bells breezed through the electronics department, scanning the area for a brunette with a bunch of kids. The computer department was supposed to be down this way someplace. Kids like computers. Maybe they were down here. He kept jingling the bracelet with the purple stones in his pocket like a pair of dice. Mikey-boy was right—she did like purple. He knew that.

  “You looking, Stanley, or what?” he asked, but he was talking to himself. When he realized that Stanley wasn’t with him, he stopped and looked over his shoulder. Stanley was back by the TV sets. The friggin’ guy was watching TV.

  “Hey, Stanley, what the hell’re you doing?” Bells went back to get his man, who was in a trance, his brow all wrinkled as he stared at the rows of TV sets lined up on the wall. He was watching the goddamn news.

  Bells stopped to see what was so interesting. Just a bunch of cops hanging around this white car, yellow police tape all around. There was a close-up of some blood on the front seat, but you could barely make it out. The reporter was saying something about this being “off the New Jersey Turnpike in Ridge-field, New Jersey.”

  Bells furrowed his brow as he watched the broadcast on a fifty-four-inch projection television. He listened carefully to the reporter’s voice-over as the camera panned some of the cops hanging around the white car. “Local police and federal authorities have joined forces to apprehend the prime suspect in the attempted murder of FBI Special Agent Gary Petersen. Right now they are focusing their efforts on this man: Anthony Bellavita, who police say is also known as ‘Tony Bells.’”

  “Bells! Did you hear that?”

  “Shut up.” Bells stared at the giant television. His picture was on the set. A black-and-white shot of him walking down the street in a short-sleeve shirt. A friggin’ surveillance photo.

  In his pocket, Bells fingered through the stones on the bracelet as if they were rosary beads.

  “Law-enforcement personnel are always particularly upset when one of their own is shot in the line of duty, and FBI agents are no different, as you can see from the angry response one FBI official had to the presence of our camera crew.”

  “Move on. Now. Or I’ll blow your bleep-ing eyes out.”

  On the screen, some ugly old guy was pointing his gun right into the camera lens. You could hear the film crew arguing with him.

  The purple stones were flying through Bells’s fingers. His mind was fixed on that picture of himself he’d just seen on TV.

  He stared blankly at the old grouch on the screen, then suddenly noticed that the guy’s face was all swollen on one side. Bells stepped closer and focused on the guy’s face. That was the old guy that Mikey Santoro had been talking to on the corner this morning in Bayonne. The old guy who was supposedly looking for a dentist.

  Dentist my ass.

  Bells looked up from the big television and saw that swollen face on every other set in the store. Three long rows of the ugly mother filled the whole wall, floor to ceiling, five inches to thirty-two inches. Son of a bitch. Son of a fucking bitch.

  That surveillance photo came back on, Bells walking down the street in black and white times a hundred.

  “Authorities are asking for any information that will lead to the arrest of this man, Anthony ‘Tony Bells’ Bellavita. If you have any information, please call the number you see at the bottom of your screen.”

  Bells ground the bracelet in his fingers.

  Stanley was hopping around like a flea. “Bells? Bells? We better get outta here. Jesus Christ! C’mon!”

  But he didn’t hear Stanley. He didn’t hear anything. His mind was fixed on Mikey-boy Santoro, or whoever the fuck he really was. He was either a cop working undercover or some punk the cops had flipped. Whichever he was, it didn’t matter because what he really was was a rat. A big fuckin’ rat.

  Bells pulled the bracelet out of his pocket and stared at it in his palm. Yeah. A big fuckin’ rat with big fuckin’ ideas. Too big. He put the bracelet back in his pocket and started to walk toward the escalators, nice and easy, not running, wondering just how the h
ell Mikey the rat knew she liked purple. How?

  “Bells? Bells? Whatta’ya doing? We gotta get outta here.”

  Stanley trailed behind, but Bells didn’t pay any attention to him. He kept walking, not fast, not slow. He was looking for a fuckin’ rat and his Minnie Mouse. And he was gonna find them. Oh, yes. He was gonna find them.

  Bells was walking fast now, shaking that bracelet in his pocket like a maraca, scanning the departments, the racks of clothes, the shoe departments, the shirt departments, the furniture, the luggage, the towels, the curtains, everything. He looked at everything, but he didn’t see any of it because he only had one thing on his mind. Finding Gina and Mikey-boy.

  He was aware of Stanley trailing behind, trying to keep up, squawking that they should get outta there fast. Well, they were gonna get outta there. He had every intention of getting outta there. He just couldn’t put anything into words right now because he was like a guided missile. He only had one function: Finding them.

  As he hopped on another escalator and loped down the moving steps two at a time, slipping around shoppers and leaving Stanley behind, his mind was a blur. He had no plan. He wasn’t sure what he thought about those two just yet. All he knew was that someone was fucking with him, and that had to be dealt with.

  Bells leaped off the last three steps of the escalator and picked up his pace, scanning the faces of the women in the teens’ department, scanning and rejecting, one face after another, searching for the purple glasses. Then suddenly he heard kids laughing, and he turned his head and saw them, in a little snack bar, her sitting at the end of the booth full of kids, looking up at Mikey-boy, those purple glasses looking right up at her Mikey-boy.

  Bells stopped and stared at them, and in his mind they gradually became one and the same because they were both guilty of the same thing: Disloyalty to him.

  Mikey-boy was working with that ugly old grouch from the FBI. For all Bells knew, Mikey-boy could be FBI. But in Bells’s mind, being a fed was no excuse for what Mikey-boy had done. The bastard had worked his way into Bells’s confidence, had even gotten Bells to vouch for him with Buddha Stanzione. And all the while the guy intended to rat on him, to fuck him over. Mikey-boy was the lowest, the worst of the worst. He was a traitor, and if there was one thing that Bells could not stand, it was a traitor. To him, there was nothing more important in the world than loyalty. Without it, people were no better than animals. And if a man couldn’t be trusted, he deserved to be shot like an animal, a diseased animal.