A Well-Known Secret

by Fusilli, Jim;

  It will never stop. I’ll always do it.

  Let’s not kid ourselves.

  By the time I reached 35th and Fifth, I’d found a better place to be: I was thinking about Marina and me in the Delphi, a booth in the back. We had just learned that her agent had sold her “Blue Boats of Gallipoli” to the wife of the chairman of Banca Popolare di Bergamo for $800,000 and still we were sharing a $6 turkey club sandwich.

  But that memory brought another: “Noci,” her painting of the church of St. Maria del Barsento, had been in Credit Suisse First Boston’s offices at 5 World Trade Center.

  I was trying to recall the whitewashed brick, the bell in the tower, the simple cross in the keystone, when my cell phone rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Where are you?” Bella asked.

  I told her.

  “Look up at the Empire State Building.”

  “Bella, it’s easier to see the Empire State Building from 135th and Fifth than it is from here.”

  “There’s no 135th and Fifth.”

  There is—Fifth wraps around Mount Morris Park before it vanishes at 141st—but why argue?

  She asked, “Where are you going?”

  “The D.A.’s,” I said. I’d left a message for Julie: I wanted to see the files on Hassan, Bascomb and the leader Sixto and, I told her machine, I could justify the request to her boss, if necessary.

  “Say hello to Ms. Knight for me.”

  “Bella, why are you home now?”

  “No sixth and seventh period on Thursdays, Dad.”

  “You don’t—”

  “Because of my book. The extra frees to write. Remember?”

  No. “That’s right,” I said. I waited for the light to go green. Most of the crowd that had surrounded me had disappeared into office buildings or had turned on 34th. For them, the dull, reassuring routine continued. “What’s up, Bella?”

  “Oh, not much,” she said, her sweet voice trailing off. “Just ask.”

  “How did you—”

  “Bella …”

  “Can Glo-Bug and Eleanor and maybe another kid come over tonight?”

  Now I was next to the Empire State, a building I admired. Its existence suggested an audacity, its design a blend of strength and beauty, the impossible speed with which it was built a fervor and confidence, that defined New York in the early 1930s. And it, like the Chrysler Building and the Woolworth Building closer to my home, suggested a New York bent but unbowed, rattled but never defeated.

  “Three kids. What for?”

  “Global project,” she said. “And to hang out.”

  I couldn’t deny her when she was forthright. Who doesn’t admire directness?

  “Sure,” I told her.

  “Are you going to be here?”

  “Where would I go?” I asked.

  “What I’m saying is if you want to do something you can.”

  “What do the other parents say?”

  She said, “I’m the only one who’s not allowed to be home alone after dark.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Maybe you could go find Dennis a date,” she offered. “He called.”

  “He did.” As Fifth continued its downward slope, I could see the bare, sturdy trees of Madison Square Park, the gray stone of the Flatiron Building up ahead and, in the distance, the empty sky. “I thought you were his date.”

  “He needs a real date, Dad. He’s pining. To me.”

  Is he ever not stoned? “I’ll call him.”

  “Better hurry,” she advised. “You’ve got two days.”

  I decided I’d go behind the Flatiron, covered in lean, midday shadows now, and continue on Broadway to Union Square. To give Julie time to pull the files, I thought maybe I’d drop in on the coffee shop off the park and see if Dorotea Salgado had returned. Or ask around the neighborhood: She might have been anonymous a week ago, another of the hardworking immigrants who toiled in the heart of town. But now she was a woman whose daughter had been killed. That sad fact would lift her from anonymity, if only temporarily.

  “Bella, how’s Mrs. Maoli doing?” I asked.

  “Good. She’s got a lot of energy, I think. She’s doing all her chores in, like, record time. I think she goes someplace after she leaves here.”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “I think it’s chicken,” she answered. “It’s in the oven, spitting and hissing. With garlic. Lots.”

  I told her I’d see her for dinner, that I had to move on.

  “OK, Dad,” she said. “How’s your head?”

  “Same as always.”

  “Who knows what that means?”

  “I didn’t hear you, Bella. Static.”

  “See you tonight.”

  We said good-bye.

  Julie was standing with her hands on the hard chair, back to the rows of books. She wore a gray-tweed suit with an off-white blouse that was open at the neck.

  “Where’s your crucifix?” I asked, pointing at the space above the breastbone where the thin gold cross usually rested.

  “No overt display of religious symbols in court, Mr. Orr,” she replied with a warm, subtle smile. “It’s in my pocket.”

  “This them?”

  I nodded toward the files on the table.

  “Hassan, Bascomb and Sixto.”

  She came around the chair and put her hand on the top file.

  “Sharon is OK with you looking through these in here,” she said. “No photocopying.” She pointed to a yellow legal pad and Bic pen on the table. “You can take notes.”

  “Fair enough.” I started to slip out of my soft leather jacket.

  “I’ll be in my office,” she said as she came out from behind the chair.

  I told her thanks. I tossed my jacket on the table and, jostling the chair in under me, I reached across for the top folder—Hassan—and started to flip through forms, pink and goldenrod copies, Xeroxed pages, transcripts, typed, handwritten, disorder that somehow seemed orderly. All sorts of seals: city, state, INS. And official rubber stamps and florid signatures.

  “Terry.”

  I looked up. Julie handed me a small San Pellegrino. Droplets ran along the green bottle, across the pale-blue label.

  She had snapped the silver cap.

  “Thanks.”

  She smiled. Then she added, “As I said, I’ll be in my office.”

  “Julie.”

  “Yes?”

  “Julie, you and Sharon understand that there’s something going on here.”

  She shook her head slightly, gently. “I think what we understand is that you have an interest.”

  I leaned across the table, grabbed the yellow pad and pushed it toward her.

  “Since I found Sonia Salgado’s body, I’ve been threatened, assaulted—”

  “I saw that. Your eye,” she said, as she sat next to me. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I replied.

  She was facing me, pen in hand on the pad. “‘Threatened, assaulted’ …”

  “Assaulted, lied to, trailed by at least one cop,” I said.

  “Why ‘at least one’?”

  “Somebody knew where I was headed when I got this,” I replied, pointing to my eye.

  “And where were you going?”

  “To the Avellaneda. I don’t think there’s much doubt the guy who runs it, Safi Majorelle, is actually Ahmed Hassan.” I tapped the open file.

  She wrote on the yellow pad.

  “And,” I told her, “I got called up to Danilo Villa’s office.”

  “I might have guessed,” she smiled. “What did he say?”

  “That Sonia didn’t kill Glatzer.”

  “Of course.”

  I looked away.

  “Terry … What?”

  “People tell me she was a susceptible, somewhat slow-witted girl who couldn’t have pulled off the theft and fenced six hundred K in diamonds.”

  “Maybe not, Terry,” she said. “But the bloody envelope was fou
nd in her possession—”

  “Not exactly.”

  “—and a jury of her peers, Terry, declared she killed this old man.”

  “Her peers? Thirty years ago?” I asked, without rancor. “Jule, I can’t believe the jury was anything but twelve men who read the papers, knew Glatzer’s good name, his influential friends—”

  “That’s not really fair, Terry,” she replied calmly, reasonably, as she tapped the plastic pen on the pad.

  “Sonia Salgado was a patsy. A dreamer, who for thirty years held on to a fantasy that she’d be an actress when she was let out.”

  “A patsy? That I find hard to believe,” she said. But her inquisitive expression, the way she had changed her posture in the chair, the way she spun the pen as she held my gaze, told me she wasn’t as resolute as her reply suggested.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I find it hard to believe that she would sit for thirty years in Bedford Hills and tell no one what you say really happened.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” I said. “But I can imagine this girl, this girl who might’ve been strong enough to cut paper with scissors, is overwhelmed, scared, confused, used, and promises that have been made are all she has to hold on to.”

  “But thirty years, Terry …”

  “I don’t know. I suppose a fantasy can sustain someone for a long time,” I said. “Things change, Jule. Eighteen months, two years, three: shock, anger, confusion. And then it changes again. There is some acceptance. What’s happening seems inevitable. And then five, ten years have gone by and what’s left is the new life, the fantasy.”

  “You believe she was told if she kept quiet she’d be able to be an actress?” she asked.

  “An actress on Broadway,” I replied. “Maybe. Or maybe it was something more fundamental. Maybe she was waiting for Sixto to return.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Villa suggested that Sixto and Sonia had something going,” I told her. “After the robbery, the killing of Glatzer, he said Sixto disappeared.”

  “So she gave up thirty years of her life for love? Oh, my.”

  I tapped Hassan’s file, then pointed to the short stack on the other side of the table.

  “I’m looking through these,” I said, “because I don’t know. Now I got this”—I pointed to the purple skin at the corner of my eye—“and I’ve got Tommy Mango out of his jurisdiction and I get called by Danny Villa. Doesn’t sound right to me.”

  “I see.”

  She said those two words with such earnestness that I believed her: She was opening her mind, looking at the other side without partisanship. An admirable trait. An enviable one.

  “You know, Julie,” I said, “I think if you were here thirty years ago, you would’ve been asking the questions no one back then seemed to ask.”

  She shifted. I thought I noticed a blush touch her round cheeks.

  I said, “But Sharon once told me something, Jule: ‘Prosecutors prosecute.’ After all the old movies I watched in which lawyers played cop before they went to trial, I needed to know that.”

  “She likes that one,” she smiled. “A favorite expression, for sure.”

  “I’m just saying we ought to see where this goes before the prosecutors prosecute.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I tapped Hassan’s file.

  She understood and she nudged the pad toward me, tearing away the sheet she’d written on.

  “I’ll come by later,” she said.

  I turned in the chair.

  If she returned, I didn’t notice. I dove into the files and stayed there and I felt fine doing it, scratching out notes on the legal pad, pausing only to see if what I’d written revealed anything that might not have been clear before. After reading through the three files as if they were chapters of an awkwardly constructed epistolary novel, I went through them again and again. And then I focused on the years immediately following when Hassan, Bascomb and Sixto met in high school and started making foolish, immature mistakes that might’ve turned into something that’s as bad as it can be. The files were kept in reverse chronological order, so I saw them at their worst before I learned how they got that way. Hassan was the least problematic of the small gang: petty crime that never escalated to felony; or at least he was never caught at it. Bascomb, a big guy born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, was the worst of the bunch on paper: He did 39 months for assault when he was 26. He was picked up a half-dozen times before that, always strong-arm stuff. And loitering, down on Tenth Avenue or in the old trainyards. Which didn’t mean he liked to hang around. It meant he had a big mouth and couldn’t keep from yapping at a cop who tried to get him to move on.

  Or maybe not: Sixto had the same two loitering raps. Maybe the big goon stood there with his huge arms folded when Sixto played streetcorner lawyer and had them both run in.

  Sixto looked like the kind of cocky kid who’d think he was smart. And the kind who might be able to get his way with young, impressionable girls: straight black hair, deep-set eyes, a jutting jawline, flat nose, an affected sneer. Back then, at least a decade after it went out of fashion, Luis Sixto looked like he’d been one of the Sharks in West Side Story. Which might’ve been why he looked familiar. I felt like I might’ve seen him flicking a switchblade at Riff, just before they did a pirouette in tight jeans.

  He had his mug shot snapped after getting caught shoplifting. “Said perpetrator was observed …” Sixto’s M.O.: grabbing gold jewelry and slipping it under his tongue. What might’ve worked in Gimbel’s got him probation when he tried it at Van Cleef & Arpels on Fifth. But nothing violent. Nothing with a knife. Same with Hassan. And with Bascomb, who preferred his fists and a blackjack.

  I flipped the page on the yellow pad, then started digging though the files again, looking hard this time for any link that might rise above coincidence, writing down my observations as if doing so made them interesting. Bascomb was born to the neighborhood, but Sixto came to it when he was 11 months old from Cienfuegos after a brief stop in Kendall outside of Miami. Hassan arrived when he was three. They all went to De-Witt Clinton with mixed results: Bascomb dropped out, Sixto made National Honor Society as a sophomore (though never again) and Hassan put three years into the drama club where, it was safe to guess, he met Sonia.

  It all seemed to confirm what Villa had said. And he was right about their life of petty crime. Bascomb and Sixto had a few motor-vehicle violations in their files. Tedious stuff: busted taillight, failure to stop. Bascomb got a ticket for turning right on a red, something that’s legal almost everywhere today, the kind of thing that was usually waved off with a warning.

  Sixto was probably riding shotgun, I thought. Probably tried to tell off the cop. Streetcorner lawyer becomes front-seat mouthpiece.

  If Sixto came up with the robbery of Glatzer, made off with the diamonds, then disappeared, as Villa suggested, he’d learned to keep his yap shut.

  I didn’t have to write that down.

  I was back in Sixto’s file, combing through the traffic sheet, when I noticed something that made me shift in the chair and bring my sporadic pen-slapping to an abrupt halt.

  On a December night, coming across town, Sixto ran a red light on Houston in Alphabet City. Actually, he ran two lights: on Clinton and, three blocks later, on Essex. A cop on patrol saw him, threw on the siren and cherry top, and pulled him over across from Katz’s on Ludlow, citing him for both violations on a single ticket.

  The cop who signed it 33 years ago: Ernest Mangionella.

  As I stared at the signature, barely legible on the carbon copy of the ticket, I realized I knew nothing about Tommy Mango’s family, other than that he had a brother, Jimmy, who had a 14-year-old son. I didn’t know, or couldn’t remember, if Tommy was married, had been married, had kids. I knew nothing about their father.

  And then I heard Addison’s voice again: “Bad from the cradle.”

  What was it Leo had said? “Bad seed.”

 
Jimmy was a neighborhood wiseguy, a spry punk with a narrow streak of charm and a lot of kinetic vitality he wasted on the short end. He hustled pool, snarked dime bags of pot, sold DVD players out of the trunk of his car, did a little work for me when I needed a body with a pair of eyes and quick legs. Mostly he hid in the broad shadow of his brother. Before the Madman appeared, I had little need for the Mangionella brothers. I didn’t play pool, didn’t smoke weed, and now I had a DVD player. And Tommy was the ball of muscle in gray toupee, an almost tasteful suit and buffed, pointed shoes, who looked hard at my Marina and understood he had no chance, whether she was with me or whether she was not.

  And none of that told me whether their old man had been a cop.

  “Terry.”

  Julie had a long, stylish raincoat over her suit and a leather briefcase at her side.

  I flipped over the cover of Sixto’s file, sealing in the apparent link between Tommy the Cop and Sixto. “Julie, why is Alfie Bascomb’s photo missing from his jacket?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied quickly, “but I’ve been assigned the task of tossing you out.”

  “By Sharon?” I tore sheets from the pad.

  “By everyone who’s left. The interns, security. It’s six-thirty. They want to go home.”

  I looked at my watch. She was right: I’d been at it for almost four hours.

  “We’ve got to put those away and—”

  “I understand,” I said as I stood and put the folded sheets in my back pocket. “I didn’t mean to hang you up, Jule.”

  She waved. “It’s all right. I was catching up on paperwork. You find anything interesting in there?”

  “Sure,” I told her as I popped a kink in my neck. “Sonia Salgado hung with a bunch of punks.” I leaned over to gather the files.

  “I’ll take care of that,” she said as she came closer to me. Getting ready for the evening, she’d sprayed on perfume and I caught the scent: plum, an earthy wood.