A Well-Known Secret

by Fusilli, Jim;

  I was at 46th, wondering if Gold Teeth had a portable DAT player hooked to his back, when I heard someone call my name.

  Tommy Mango had his foot up on the fire hydrant, catching the sun on his patent-leather shoes. He wore a perfect dark-blue suit.

  ____________

  1 See page 308.

  SEVEN

  He waited for me to come to him. I did. I couldn’t do him like McDowell.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  He stepped away from the hydrant.

  “What I tell you, Terry?” he began, aggressively. “I told you to play house. Didn’t I?”

  “I don’t play house, Tommy,” I told him.

  He reached up to touch the gash at the corner of my eye. Instinctively, I brushed aside his hand.

  Before I could react, he grabbed my wrist and gripped it tight. With his other hand, he snapped a finger against the wound.

  Then he let go.

  “What’s your point, Tommy?” The quick jolt to the scab brought a tear to my right eye. “It’s the badge that lets you guys smack whoever you want.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but you ain’t got one.”

  “I want to smack somebody, Tommy, I don’t need a badge.”

  He stopped. I pulled back. Under that suit, that white-on-white shirt, Mango had short arms. I wasn’t going to let him grab me again.

  Suddenly, he smiled. “Terry, you always have to do it the hard way. That’s you.”

  I said, “What’s up, Tommy?”

  “I guess I got to talk to you myself.” With a wave of his hand, he said, “Come on. There’s a gin mill up the street.”

  “It’s 11 o’clock.”

  “We’re talking, kid. Not drinking. Though maybe a little Jim Beam might do us both nice, slow us down. What do you think?”

  I wasn’t going into a dark bar with Tommy Mango. Not when he was in a mood to muscle up.

  “Espresso.”

  He used his shield to get us into La Cucina on 44th. He took a double espresso and had them toss in a spoonful of Sambucca. L’Acqua Minerale for me. And a lemon biscotti.

  We were alone among the white linen tablecloths in the long room.

  “Terry, you’re smart enough to lose the kid—”

  “The hydrant you were standing on’s got more going for it than that kid, Tommy. You can do better.”

  “He’s what we’ve got.” He took a sip of the hot coffee. As he returned the cup to the saucer, I caught a whiff of the anise liqueur and I recalled, without trying to, that Marina’s father kept a bottle made by a friend. Benedicto watched as I sipped the thick licorice drink. He made a gesture with the side of his fist. “Forte.” As the warmth spread across my chest, the old man seemed pleased: His future son-in-law had respected his tradition, accepted his courtesy.

  Mango said, “Terry, it’s not—Terry, over here.”

  “I’m with you, Tommy.”

  “Terry, it’s not like I don’t see what you’re doing. You find this woman dead on the floor and you want to know. You got to know. But I’m telling you you’re way off.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “It’s a B-and-E. Or some bitch fight going on since Bedford, I don’t know.”

  I looked down at the crumbs on the tablecloth.

  “What?” he said. “That don’t add up for you?”

  I’d already told him it didn’t.

  “She’s in a halfway house with four other cons,” he said, filling the silence. “Her place looks like a fuckin’ palace next to what they got.”

  “All right,” I said, “but what did they take?”

  “Who knows? A little cash, maybe.”

  I thought of the $10 bill McDowell had lifted from Santa Barbara, but I kept quiet.

  “You, I know.” He pointed at me. “You’re going to stir up all sorts of shit.”

  I shook my head. “That explains what, Tommy?”

  “So I tell the kid to follow you, see where you’re nosing around. I’m thinking maybe you’ll hook up with the old broad who hired you. You do that, Terry, and we find out something new about her.”

  “I haven’t seen her,” I said, shaking my head lightly.

  “She didn’t put you together with Villa?”

  “No,” I told him. “Villa called me.”

  “He called you,” he repeated flatly, with a sudden flash of fire in his eyes. “And he said what?”

  “There were no diamonds.”

  “Thirty years ago, there were no diamonds,” Mango said. “Then why did she kill him?”

  “He says she didn’t.”

  “Not a peep out of this broad for thirty years.” Mango reached across and broke off a piece of the cookie. “Soon he’ll be on Live at Five telling everybody she was set up. You know, everybody gets along, spics and the whites, and this Villa’s out of a fuckin’ job.”

  He dusted his hands over the table.

  “And what about the guy at the theater?” he asked. “What’s his name?”

  “Tommy, you know his name. Your guys were there.”

  He nodded. “He’s got nothing. We both know that.”

  “Except he may be the only friend she had,” I added. “And he’s dying.”

  “That’s how it works, kid. You stick your neck out, you get cancer.”

  I leaned forward. “So it’s a B-and-E, nobody knows anything, but yet I’ve got this,” I said as I gestured to the cut near my eye.

  He laughed. “It’s a conspiracy.”

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t too funny, Tommy, when he was swinging his wrench over my head.”

  “A wrench did that? No, a wrench and you lose your eye. A dent in your face forever.” He inspected the bottom of his sky-blue necktie. “Terry Orr goes walking through midtown, thinking about his wife, his boy, off in space thinking about better days five, ten years ago, and he’s a mark. You keep doing that you should wear a neon sign says, ‘Mug me.’”

  A six-foot-four, 225-pound mark. Me.

  I took a sip of the water. Fine, crisp. But not Badoit.

  At the bar, a young waitress stacked hard-boiled eggs in a silver receptacle.

  “Listen, Terry, I don’t want to hurt you. You’re doing this P.I. thing, that’s your business. You throw my brother Jimmy a little work, that’s fine. But I want you to keep your nose out of this.”

  “Look, Tommy—”

  “I’m fuckin’ serious, Terry,” he said firmly, without raising his voice. “You’re going to find your ass is exposed you keep this up. And the last person you want to piss off is me. And you know that. I don’t fuck around, D.A. or no D.A.”

  I pushed the remainder of the cookie toward him.

  “It’s not so much being an enemy, Terry,” he continued as he went to take the last bite. “It’s not being a friend.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “For a few seconds there, I almost thought you were threatening me.”

  He swallowed, then brought the linen napkin to his lips. “An example, Terry, one you’ll appreciate. Do you know a drug company in Indianapolis, one of the big ones?”

  I shrugged.

  He said, “They had this guy come in, he wants a job.”

  “All right.”

  “A job in what they call the Animal Conduct unit,” Mango said. “He’s got no experience but it’s a menial job, sweeping up monkey shit, so it’s OK.”

  “Tommy, what—”

  “This guy, he gives them a name, a Social Security number. They’ve got to run a sheet on him,” he said. “You got to be bonded if you want to work there.”

  “And?”

  “And turns out the guy is dead.”

  “Phony papers,” I said.

  “Sure. This guy, this redheaded guy, can’t give his real name.”

  Red hair.

  “The company calls the local police and they tell them to string him along, invite him back in,” Mango continued. “But the guy doesn’t show. He catches on.”

  �
��All right.”

  “The cops in Indianapolis, they go to the address the guy gave, some kind of Midwest version of a flop, and he’s gone.”

  “He’s gone?” I repeated.

  Mango nodded. “But they found some interesting things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like an empty bottle of a prescription drug, Zoloft.”

  “With his real name on it,” I said, too eagerly.

  Mango shook his head. “He gave the clinic the fake papers too.”

  “And what else?”

  “Out in the garbage, scraps of paper with some kind of music written on it. Notes. Some cop out there claims it’s by Bach. The Goldstein—”

  “The Goldberg Variations.” I could feel my pulse quicken.

  “Might be,” he shrugged. “My point is, Terry—”

  “Your point is that they found Raymond Montgomery Weisz in Indianapolis.”

  After four years, confirmation that he still exists. The shadow in my dreams, the ever-present specter in the life Bella and I had cobbled together: The Madman is alive. He is real. The redheaded former child prodigy of the piano, the psychotic misfit who, after becoming unhinged, was found living in the Bronx Zoo, scaling fences and climbing into the landscaped forests and open meadows where the animals resided. The homeless man, dirt caked on his ankles, hands and face, who raced across the platform and tossed Davy and his stroller onto the subway tracks and watched as Marina scrambled in vain to save him. The murderer who vanished and remained so. Until he turned up in Indianapolis.

  The air had leaped from my lungs. The muscles in my neck and across my shoulders had tightened.

  “Terry. Yo, Terry.”

  Returning, I muttered, “Weisz.”

  “My point is that a friend is a friend.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Over the winter,” Mango replied. “November, December. After the World Trade Center.”

  “Tommy, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  “Your question should be ‘Why didn’t my friend Luther Addison tell me?’”

  Addison had been the investigating officer when Weisz killed Marina and Davy. For the past four years, he’d spent a lot of time trying to jerk me back, telling me Weisz was merely a suspect. When they couldn’t find him, Addison’s men started telling me that maybe the witnesses had it wrong. That they’d made the wrong guy.

  I am irrational, says Luther Addison. I am obsessed. Though he concedes I’m no longer an amateur, he says my methods are crude and naive. He tells this to Sharon Knight. He tells this to me. “You disappoint me, Terry,” says Lieutenant Addison, husband, father, a man who claimed he understood. I think: I disappoint you? As I groped in the darkness, oblivious, half alive, ignorant even of the responsibilities I had to my own child, never did I consider that you would conceal vital information from me, that you wouldn’t understand. “Terry, you are corrupting what little we have,” he charged. I have corrupted witnesses, with unannounced visits, with late-night phone calls, with articles in The New York Times. “Now they don’t know what they saw, Terry,” Addison told me, “because they feel sorry for Gabriella and for you.”

  Pity? For Bella, perhaps. For me? Absolutely not.

  I wrote this in a letter to Marina, a year after she’d gone: “I am never without you, mei carissima, as I am never without this thought: Had I been with you, holding your hand, listening to your tales, learning to be more; had I been holding Davy, tickling him under his chin, running my finger across his glistening lips to provoke a smile; had I …”

  I heard a voice: “Terry, whoa. Terry.”

  I focused on the cop as he returned the espresso cup to the saucer.

  He said, “Man, when you do that …”

  “Yeah, well …” I sipped the sparkling water.

  “Terry, nobody’s saying you ought to fall back into your funk,” he said. “Nobody wants to see you walking around TriBeCa like a zombie again, your daughter looking up at you.”

  “But …”

  “‘But,’” he repeated sarcastically. “What did you tell Jimmy? ‘Nothing matters ’til this nut fuck is torn down.’”

  “Something like that.”

  “Which means you take advice from a friend who can help with what’s important,” he said sharply. “And my advice—Once again, my advice is for you to stay away from Salgado, Villa, Hassan and all the other people you think are in this fuckin’ thing. You got me?”

  “I hear you,” I told him.

  “And when Sharon Knight asks you what happened, you tell her something that says, ‘Nothing. A B-and-E gone south.’ And you walk away.”

  He stood, tossing the linen napkin on the table.

  “Shake my hand,” he said.

  I did.

  “I’m going back downtown,” he said as he adjusted his suit jacket. “You want a lift?”

  I said no.

  “Go to the movies, Terry. Or a museum. You like museums, right? Pictures?”

  “All right. Tommy.”

  He put a finger to his temple. “Everybody says you got good brains. Use them.”

  He patted me on the shoulder, buttoned his jacket and went to say good-bye to the lean, silver-haired maître d’. On his way to the door, he lifted a hard-boiled egg, looked at it, then returned it to the waitress.

  I refilled the glass with sparkling water and took a long drink.

  I wasn’t unaware that Tommy the Cop had said Hassan, not Majorelle.

  I got a good brain.

  As I leaned forward to ease out of the chair, I caught a whiff of the anise.

  I tossed a $10 bill on the table and pulled out my cell phone.

  I said, “Lieutenant Addison, please.”

  And on the way uptown, walking toward the park, I couldn’t make it work, no matter how many times I tossed it around. I couldn’t make it fit. Why would Addison deliberately deceive me, intentionally mislead me? To preserve his supremacy, status as the lead dog, alpha male? Promote his perception that Weisz is not the killer; no, merely a suspect? “Luther, can you tell me he didn’t do it?” I asked him, last winter, at Virgil’s, over pulled pork and unsweetened iced tea.

  “Listen, Terry,” he said solemnly, “you have to stop. This isn’t doing you—”

  “No buts, Luther, all right? No.”

  Addison knows where Weisz is, I thought now, as I crossed Sixth, Radio City up ahead and budding green trees in the distance. Addison knows where he is and he won’t tell me because …

  Because why?

  He conceals what?

  No. Even I know that Luther Addison cannot stand accused of false behavior.

  Of excessive patience, yes. Of an occasional lack of focus, sure. (“T, I’m not, you know, defending him or nothing, but he’s probably got 50, 100 murder cases to solve,” Diddio explained. “I mean, he ain’t Columbo.”) Of moral corruption? No, though there were times when I would take comfort in the thought that he too didn’t care whether the Madman would be pulled by his matted red hair from the dark, urine-soaked maze in which he hid, to be brought down, hard and forever.

  Luther Addison is a good man.

  I was running on West on the river’s side, having hung a 180 up by the Intrepid, and I was coming back fast. No pain in my knee, no stitch in my side. The weather was perfect, a slight breeze off the Hudson, flawless pale-blue skies, and perhaps it was this prelude to a beautiful September day, the definition of Indian summer in New York City, that cleared my mind and I wasn’t thinking, I was running, and my mind was clear.

  And I saw it: The big silver plane was far too low, this I knew immediately. But I tried to understand—maybe my angle is wrong, my eyesight off, maybe the plane is farther south than it seems and, for some reason, it’s taking an odd flight path to LaGuardia. An emergency, perhaps; a mechanical failure of a sort. But there was no smoke, no flames; and the plane seemed to hold its lane in the sweet sky.

  I didn’t stop: the mental equivalent of a shrug, an
d the quick thought, Maybe I’ll keep an eye on that as it continues to bank to the east. I was really running now, and my heart was racing, and my skin was warm and moist with perspiration that caught the breeze off the river, and the silver plane slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, about three-quarters of the way up, maybe higher. And I saw it, I absolutely saw it. And I knew, because it had moved, glided, with such confidence, resolution. Though I was confused: a malevolent plane? No, a crazy man. A pilot gone mad. But the copilot …

  Christ.

  I pivoted, a hard left, and crossed West, and I was on 14th, running harder now, dodging cars, hearing sirens, and I made it to Greenwich Avenue and took that, not Washington, to get to Carmine. And to my surprise there were a few parents outside the school, not many, but they seemed calm as they looked at me with tilted heads, bizarre expressions, and I ran up the steps, two, three at a time, and I looked in classrooms, classrooms, class—And there she was, and it was clear she didn’t know, no one knew, and as I tried to open the door, my damp hand slid off the knob, but I grabbed it a second time and I got it. By now, Bella was standing, and as I yanked open the door, I heard her say “Dad” in a voice that encompassed fear, embarrassment, amazement, wonder.

  I reached for her, clumsily—I missed her hand and caught her wrist.

  “Dad, what?” She groped for a notebook, a pen, on her desk.

  I heard another voice, “You—” Man or woman?

  “Come on,” I insisted, shouted. “Bella, let’s go.”

  And as she surrendered to my urgency, another voice, sporadic, crackling from the speakers in the ceiling.

  Something about an explosion at the World Trade Center.

  Bella’s classmates, I saw them, they were looking at each other, trying to stay cool. (They must be cool, detached. They’re teenagers. It’s high school.) But they could not. So many of them had one parent, two parents, among the 30,000 or so employees in the towers.

  Bella and I were back on Carmine.

  “Dad!”

  “Bella, a plane hit the World Trade Center,” I said, gasping.

  She didn’t speak. She looked up at me.

  “On purpose,” I added. “I know it.”