A Well-Known Secret

by Fusilli, Jim;

  On the east side of Broadway was an Eddie Bauer, a Gap. On this side, Tower Records, a Pottery Barn. Midtown Manhattan, a mall on the outskirts of Boise, Idaho: the same thing. Welcome to the cultural capital of the world.

  “I need clothes?” I asked.

  A sarcastic smile was her reply.

  “I dress better than Diddio.”

  “Hey,” she said sharply. “Leave him alone.”

  I wondered which direction Marina had been coming from. Maybe east, from the Park. Or maybe she’d been strolling Davy through the Lincoln Center campus. It was modeled after the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, designed by Michelangelo. The fountain in its center, with the breeze off the Hudson, made the plaza a pleasant stop on a summer’s afternoon.

  There was a concert that noon in Damrosch Park. The music of Niccolò Castiglioni.

  “Let’s take the stairs,” she said. “And, yes, for Julie, you’ll need new clothes.”

  I took a breath and followed her as she held on to the cold banister in the center of the steep stairwell. I stared at her hand, compelling myself to remember when it was pink, pudgy and little.

  I felt fine. Just a bit nervous, a little tense. Natural.

  When she reached the bottom step, she turned to face me. “Clean, no?”

  That it was, and well-lit. New gray tiles, shining silver turnstiles, readable maps in frames. Graffiti? None.

  A subway station outside of Boise.

  “Come on, Dad. We’ll go stand on the platform.”

  “I—Sure. Why not?”

  She took a MetroCard out of her denim jacket. After she swiped it, I hesitated, then passed through the turnstile, pushing its blunt bar with my knee. She followed.

  We were alone.

  The familiar scent of stale air, of the mire between the tracks, cleaning solutions, disinfectant. A woman who had either boarded the last train or just left the station wore too much sweet, candy-like perfume.

  “You look good, Dad. Pretty steady.”

  Rita Santiago was standing over there. She was closest to the shadowy alcove where Weisz had been hiding. Gerald Schaber, who was reading Town and Country, was over there, more or less, by the trash bin, using the overhead fluorescent lights to illuminate the magazine. He’d said he heard Marina scream before the stroller went over the edge. Maurice Bock, the piano tuner, said Marina didn’t scream until Weisz, arms outstretched, hissed angrily as the stroller went over the edge. Sylvia Barron said Marina didn’t scream, but a startled Bock did.

  Sylvia cried when I visited her, notebook and diagrams in hand. She sends us Christmas cards.

  But she didn’t try to help Marina. Neither did Santiago, Schaber, Bock, the two Benjamin kids on their way to shop in the Village. Healy, the ex-cop, did nothing. Bum leg, my ass.

  “Dad, maybe we can take the train back home. Start a new habit.”

  I looked across the platform where other Juilliard students waited for an uptown train, their instrument cases at their heels. A security guard, headed north for the four-to-midnight shift, had his lunchbox under his arm as he studied his thick shoes. Five years ago, Jean-Pierre Coceau was over there, not far from where the guard stood, according to Santiago. A resident of Breil, France, who was in the States on business, Coceau was the only one I hadn’t spoken to. But he must’ve seen it all.

  The lighting here is better than I ever imagined. Here, in this surreal subway station, with its medicinal scents, its spotless tiles, gleaming trash cans. Surprisingly normal. Calm, almost tranquil.

  My palms were damp as dishrags, and my stomach leaped.

  I could feel my skin under my clothes.

  I focused on my running shoes, on the dark pillars between the tracks.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, too quickly. “We’ll take the train back home.”

  It had to be right there, to my left. Weisz came from behind that post, banged into Marina and shoved Davy and the stroller before she could react.

  As Marina dove onto the tracks, the white light of the express train bearing down on the station, Weisz pivoted and scrambled wildly toward—Toward where I was standing now. Bobby Circati said he hurdled the turnstile. Rondell Robinson said he fell and crawled frantically under the silver bar. (I believe Robinson. A calm, reasoning man. Repaired Xerox copiers. Had it not been for his arthritic hip, I believe he would’ve helped my wife save our boy. I’ve always felt that. Meanwhile, Circati thought he had attained celebrity because he’d witnessed a deadly crime and was on Eyewitness News and in the Post. A punk. I wasn’t wrong to smack his head.)

  Robinson said, Bock said, Rachel and Zalman Holtz said, Marina tried to lift the stroller up onto the platform, but it was coated in the oily muck that seeped between the tracks. She panicked—who wouldn’t?—and then, desperately, tried again.

  Meanwhile, the train, roaring, klaxon blaring. Brakes squealing?

  Yes, said Robinson.

  No, said Donna Benjamin, then a cynical 17-year-old.

  I can’t be sure, shrugged Muhammad Sarwar from Kew Gardens, Queens.

  “Dad?”

  What would I have done had I been here, in this clean, well-lit station, with my wife and son?

  Bella was in school.

  I was doing nothing, walking around TriBeCa, killing time. I could’ve come with them.

  Why hadn’t I?

  “Hey, Dad …”

  Weisz wouldn’t have run at me. I’m too big, too obvious.

  But if he had?

  I could’ve gotten Davy off the tracks.

  I was working out four, five times a week, playing B-ball nights. I was strong, quick.

  If Weisz had somehow gotten around me, I could’ve jumped off the platform down onto the tracks and, with the train bearing down hard on me, I could’ve gotten Davy to safety, to his mother’s arms. My little boy, frightened, bruised, but alive.

  I would’ve rolled up onto the platform, seconds before the train reached me.

  Would’ve been nothing but a story to tell. A New York story, one with a happy ending.

  “Dad, here it comes. I think it’s an express.”

  I looked down at Bella. She was just a kid back then, 10 years old, very bright, precocious but curiously, wonderfully naive. The world is a sanctuary for a 10-year-old like that, a girl embraced by a loving mother, a gurgling, contented infant brother. It goes like this: She leaves for school, she returns and all is what it was before, perhaps even a bit better. The world is a rose yet to blossom.

  There are no police cars in front of the house, red lights whirling, Mrs. Maoli in tears and fighting hysteria, as Bella walks home as planned with Eva Figueroa and Glo-Bug, chatting about schoolwork, pop culture, goofy boys. Bella, innocent for the last time. All she can be, for the last time. My Bella …

  If I had been there—if I had been here—all the pain she’s endured, the loneliness, heartache, anxiety, alienation, would’ve never occurred.

  But it has. Of course, it has. All because I was not here.

  “An express, yep,” she said, over the growing noise.

  I see the light, I hear the train. Students behind us, passing through the turnstiles. A tall, thin woman who’d yet to remove her sunglasses.

  The concrete floor beneath us rattles, rumbles.

  Bella takes my hand.

  The train rushes violently toward the station. It’s not going to stop.

  I feel its power, its relentless energy. I hear its grinding wheels.

  Sparks, sulfur.

  My head is spinning and my knees buckle. The walls wobble and shake.

  “Bella …”

  “I got you, Dad.”

  The train explodes past us. I feel it, car after car, sucking air from the station, pulling air into the station, fracturing, destroying. Its ferocious forces shove me aside, knocking me away from my daughter, who holds tight onto my hand.

  And there was a kind of silence, disrupted only by the clicking of steel wheels on steel tracks
, the jangle of the cars as they rumbled off into the distance.

  “Dad, open your eyes.”

  I saw the back of the silver train as it disappeared into the tunnel blackness.

  I turned and I saw Bella. Tears streamed down her perfect cheeks.

  “You did it, Dad,” she told me.

  Her voice melting to sorrow, she said it again.

  “Dad, you did it.”

  Songs performed during the Beatles’ $500 million reunion concert at Madison Square Garden:

  First Set

  Get Back

  With a Little Help from My Friends

  Something

  Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

  Boys

  I Saw Her Standing There

  She’s Leaving Home (with the Eos Orchestra)

  The Long and Winding Road (with Eos)

  Intermission

  Second Set

  “John” medley, performed by Eos:

  A Hard Day’s Night/Strawberry Fields Forever/Julia/Across the Universe/Norwegian Wood/Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

  Because (performed by the Harlem Boys Choir)

  Here Comes the Sun (with the Harlem Boys Choir) Yesterday

  If I Needed Someone

  We Can Work It Out

  In My Life (sung by Paul and George)

  Intermission

  Third Set

  Yellow Submarine

  Penny Lane

  While My Guitar Gently Weeps (with Eric Clapton)

  Back in the USSR

  First Encore

  All You Need Is Love (sung by Paul and Jeff Lynne)

  Let It Be

  Second Encore (with Eos, Harlem Boys Choir)

  Imagine

  Hey Jude

  Diddio had the set list signed by Paul, George and Ringo as a gift for Bella. It’s now in a sealed envelope in Terry’s safe-deposit box. Neither Bella nor Terry knows what’s in the envelope.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Terry Orr Mysteries

  1

  Wallet; money? Eight dollars. ATM card, Amex, MetroCard: in the wallet. Jacket? It’s 75 degrees and it’s only 8:22.

  A little over 90 minutes to get to midtown.

  Cab, or the 1 and 9?

  Vitamin. Cabinet over the sink.

  Bella’s manuscript, in the cardboard box; the cardboard box is sealed; the sealed cardboard box is wrapped in brown paper; the wrapped, sealed cardboard box is on the kitchen table wearing a hand-printed label with Bella’s careful block letters.

  She’s asleep upstairs. Last night, on her way to her room, she said what?

  “I’m going with Glo-Bug, Daniel and Marcus to the seaport.”

  “What about dinner?”

  “I’ll be all right.” Bedroom door slams.

  A reasonable plan for a Saturday afternoon for a bunch of 15 year olds: skateboarding near Pier 17 off South Street. Shade under the FDR, and the East River, to keep them cool.

  Morrie Steiner’s address is on the hand-printed label on the brown paper on the cardboard box that holds Bella’s manuscript.

  As if I’d forget that my agent had his offices in the Brill Building, as if Diddio would let me forget: “Hey, T, the ghost of Phil Spector rattles around up there, man. I mean, it would, if he was, you know, dead. Like Sonny Bono. Or that cheese they say he smoked.”

  After I drop it off at Morrie’s, after I listen to him poke and prod me in an attempt to get me to write again, lunch at …

  Who responds to poking and prodding?

  It’s probably time to change the pass code on the locks’ keypads. Now it’s Davy’s birth date, preceded by 44, on the doors front and back.

  If someone knows when my son was born and what my number was at St. John’s …

  One more drink of water. Wash the vitamin all the way down.

  Take the empty bottle down to the recycling bin. Later.

  Need more Badoit. Only one bottle in the back of the refrigerator.

  Take the Arts and Leisure section for the ride uptown.

  “Dad, if you’re going to steal half of my paper …”

  Forget it. I’ll take Slaughter at Kinmel Hall. It fits in my back pocket and—

  I grabbed the phone on the second ring.

  “Terry …”

  Diddio, and in his voice there was panic, sorrow and fear.

  “What, D?”

  He couldn’t get the words out.

  “Just say it, D.”

  “Leo. Leo’s dead, Terry.”

  Christ. Leo. Oh no.

  “Where?”

  “At the Tilt. He’s— Terry.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I told him.

  I hung up, grabbed my cell from atop Bella’s manuscript and ran out onto Harrison.

  He was face-up, empty eyes staring at the musty tin ceiling, his back flat on the grimy linoleum. His arms lay neatly at the sides of his enormous torso, his fingers at his vast thighs.

  There was no sign of blood near the body.

  “Ah, Leo,” I moaned as I stared down at him, thinking about the bad hand he’d drawn, the sad moments he’d spent in painful reflection behind his bar, listening to soaring arias that spoke of loss, abandonment, unfulfilled potential. Leo, who had resigned from this world long before today.

  I said, “You moved him?”

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, his heaving back to the pool table, Diddio nodded as he sobbed, and he patted Leo’s head, trying to smooth out his oily brown-gray hair. Our long embrace after he unlocked the Tilt’s door had done little to assuage his grief.

  “Christ. How’d you do that?” Leo Mallard weighed at least 375 pounds.

  “He sort of landed on his side, so I, you know, nudged him over,” he replied, sniffling, running his thin arm across his nose. “I just … I just made him neat.”

  I came around and was standing now by Leo’s wide feet. He wore dark orthopedic shoes. They were scuffed and the bottoms were worn to a sheen.

  I caught the scent of stale beer as I studied the room. With the lights on and morning sun slanting through the dust-laden blinds, the Tilt-A-Whirl looked especially shabby, depressing rather than merely off-putting or vaguely threatening.

  If someone had killed Leo, he’d left nothing to prove it in the front of the bar.

  “Was the door locked when you got here?”

  Diddio nodded.

  “How’d you get in?”

  “I got a key,” he said, tears soaking his ashen face.

  I reached down, removed the handkerchief from the breast pocket of Leo’s old short-sleeved shirt, and handed it to Diddio.

  Then I went to the back and looked into the Tilt’s lone bathroom. Leo had a crude but oddly effective security system: long nails driven into the window frame, augmented by thin silver tape pressed on the edge of the beveled glass to approximate the kind used in alarm setups.

  No one had entered the Tilt through the window. Not this morning.

  After a quick peek into Leo’s disheveled office, I walked past a moldy tower of long-neck empties in crates, two booths with torn, red plastic seats, and the buck-a-game pool table, and rejoined Diddio.

  “Nobody broke in,” I said. “Nobody came up on him unless they were here all night.” I sat on the floor next to the critic and near our dear, dead friend. “What do you think?”

  Diddio shook his head. His unfashionably long Clairol-black hair slapped his drawn, sallow cheeks.

  “Heart attack?” A year ago or so, D and I had taken Leo to a cardiologist up on Park, an ace physician I’d read about in New York magazine. After the results of all the tests came back, she told us Leo had very high blood pressure, regrettable cholesterol, an enlarged heart and blockages in his legs. Diabetes would soon follow, she said, and then asked if Leo was really only 39 years old.

  “Heart attack,” Diddio agreed.

  “Maybe an aneurysm,” I added. “I’m sorry, D.”

  He sighed. “Leo.”

  I put my arm across h
is bony shoulders.

  “You were a good friend to him, D.”

  He nodded as his bottom lip trembled. “We were real friends.”

  I went to St. John’s with Diddio, who signed up to major in rock and pot while tossing in a few journalism courses. College prepared him well for life, at least for his life. He was a successful rock critic, if success is defined as making a living doing what pleases you and still loving the subject of your work. I brought him to Leo’s restaurant, Big Chief’s, early on. Bella was still a baby, and Marina and I hadn’t yet bought the Federal-style house on Greenwich and Harrison, across from Leo’s place. They hit it off, but Leo was too busy back then for friendships. Big Chief’s, and Loretta, ate up all his time.

  “Loretta,” I said, breaking the silence.

  D pondered. “She’s long, long gone,” he said finally, summarizing.

  I wondered how Loretta would react to Leo’s death.

  Loretta, who liked to crack the whip. Loretta, who put Leo down in front of the customers. Loretta, who started drinking up what was left of the profits when things started to crumble.

  Leo ran the kitchen. Loretta ran the books.

  It wasn’t the food that killed Big Chief’s.

  It should’ve been a good thing for Leo when his wife took off.

  But it drove Leo down and down. The city marshal seized the restaurant for back taxes, and Leo didn’t resurface in downtown Manhattan until five years later. It was Diddio who stumbled into the Tilt one night on his way to a show at Wetlands. The bar was empty and Leo wanted it that way. When D, hopping from side to side, jiggling, asked him if he could use the restroom, Leo said, “Only if you promise to leave right away.”

  By then, Marina was represented by Judy Harper, who sold several of her paintings to valued customers who praised Marina’s work to their equally well-heeled friends, all of whom appeared to love her affectionate scenes of the Fiorentino ancestral bed in Foggia, Italy. I’d sold my book Slippery Dick for a modest advance and, to my infinite amazement, Morrie found a Hollywood production firm, based in Vancouver, to option it.

  And so my life, or at least my future, had begun. And it was superb, until five years ago when Raymond Montgomery Weisz took it away.

  “Did you call the cops?”

  Diddio said no.