A Well-Known Secret

by Fusilli, Jim;

  “We’d better,” I said as I pushed off the floor.

  I grabbed my cell, started to punch in the number for the First Precinct, then stopped. I turned to the bar and, pointing, started to speak.

  Diddio looked up at me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I got it.”

  “Where did you put it?”

  With a snap of the head, Diddio gestured toward the jukebox. “In there.”

  Leo had kept a .38 tucked behind the bar. He let me use it when I needed to carry.

  “It’s safe?”

  “Terry, man …”

  “OK.” No one knew the Tilt’s jukebox as well as Diddio, who changed its menu about seven times a week, pulling compact disks from his warehouse supply the record companies blew him, along with the mixes he and Bella burned. Cases of the CDs were in back and under the bar, where fresh liquor, glassware, paper products and such should’ve been.

  I made the call, pacing toward cobwebs in corners, dead neon signs, and I told the cop at the desk what Diddio had found. He took the address and told me to stay put. Luckily, he didn’t ask my name, which is a particularly rancid kind of bile at the First since I helped get Tommy Mango busted down to sergeant.

  “They’re on their way,” I said.

  Diddio was behind the bar now, wistfully running a finger along one of Leo’s aprons, which the chef, out of habit, had always tucked into his belt, as if he was prepared to return to his old 10-burner gas range and his 80-quart stockpot.

  But if Leo enjoyed whipping up a Louisiana dish for friends—a miracle what he could do with the hot plate in his office—he had no intention of running a busy kitchen in a restaurant, whether he owned it or not. He made it clear that Loretta had pounded that ambition out of him, hard and forever.

  Christ. Never again the savory scent of green bell peppers, celery and yellow onions, of thyme leaves and cayenne pepper in sweet butter wafting from a well-seasoned frying pan shaken masterfully over an orange coil in back. Nor the fleeting glitter of pride, of satisfaction in Leo’s dark eyes when he limped out, hands full of steaming plates.

  Never again Leo’s salty brand of advice, issued directly, honestly.

  No more sentimental Leo.

  Or kind Leo, who gave D a second home here at the Tilt, a respite from sweaty rock clubs and his cramped studio on Great Jones.

  Fierce Leo, who, fists flying, waded into a gaggle of cops who were squeezing me at my kitchen table moments after I learned Marina and Davy were gone.

  “What’s going to happen next?” Diddio asked, tears once again gathering in front of his dark eyes.

  I came toward him. “I don’t get you, D.”

  “Death is, like, everywhere. All the time.” He pointed to the sky beyond the grubby ceiling.

  We were standing about nine blocks from where the World Trade Center went down. Throughout TriBeCa, some of the family photos and handmade posters pleading for news of the missing that were put up in the days after the towers’ collapse still clung, stubbornly, desperately, to lampposts and phone booths. Faded, ink all but invisible now, snapshots tattered by wind, sun and rain, they were simple testaments to a time set forever for thousands—the moments before their last glimmer of hope surrendered to grief.

  “Terry?”

  On the subject of death, of dying, I was the wrong guy to ask for insight. I’d spent most of the past five years trying in vain to find solace in an answer, in any answer. Failing that, I tried to ask the right question that might bring a truth to me.

  Questions like these: Why did the Madman appear? Why did he kill Marina and Davy?

  Why wasn’t I with them when he struck?

  “D,” I said, “people die. That’s the deal. And it can happen at any time.”

  “I know. That’s the point,” he replied sharply. Shock and sorrow had pushed him to the edge of exasperation and into the lap of sentimentality.

  “Yeah, D. That is the point.”

  I turned and looked at him, his vacant expression, his open palms. I was going to tell him that Leo had been engaged in slow suicide: the overindulgence in fatty foods, the lack of exercise—most days he was not so much sedentary as inert—and the weight of the bitterness he carried were evidence of the scheme he’d concocted to wage war on himself. But Diddio wasn’t going to buy it. Nor was he going to go for the “he’s in a better place now” routine.

  “Marina, your son. My Aunt Josey. Everybody we used to see from … you know. And now Leo,” Diddio counted. He dabbed the handkerchief at his tears.

  The wooden stool I’d chosen wobbled until I got myself centered.

  We were quiet for a moment, and then Diddio said, “At any time, huh?”

  “The whole deal, D. That’s why you’ve got to live while you do.” Dr. Harteveld would have been proud of that remark.

  “Get it while you can.” He mused for a moment, nodding his head, scratching his head, rubbing the rings around his eyes.

  I noticed that Leo had begun to go blue at the lips.

  Diddio folded the apron and put it on the bar. “I’d better get me some ambition,” he muttered.

  It wasn’t until almost three hours later that we went back to my place. After the coroner’s office took the body, we found we hadn’t the energy to do anything but stare at the vacant floor where Leo had lain, at his gnarled cane that Diddio had set on his now-empty throne under the TV. We would’ve cleared out the old cash register, but Leo did that every night before he huffed and scuffled over to his one-bedroom walk-up on Laight Street. Sometimes he had as much as $40 in his pocket.

  I went back to Leo’s desk and found his old phone book, its brown imitation-leather cracked along the spine. Diddio was waiting for me on steamy Hudson, his key in the lock, his red eyes on the scruffy sidewalk near the door.

  “He knew a lot of people,” I said as I tapped the book on my thigh.

  “Yeah, but he didn’t have nobody but us,” D replied as we headed south.

  We found Bella at the kitchen table, eating graham crackers she’d split in half and carefully stacked. She had the Times spread out in front of her; an open page covering her wrapped manuscript. From atop the refrigerator, NPR offered esoteric talk.

  Diddio’s blues gave it away before I could say anything.

  “What happened?” she asked. She wore an oversized Hawaiian shirt, teal except for indolent cockatoos, over red sweat shorts, and when she stood and turned to us, her bare feet squeaked on the floor.

  I let the door close behind me. “Bella …”

  “You’re both sad. You, Dennis … Something happened. Something happened bad.” Then she said, “To Leo?”

  “Yeah, Gabby. Leo’s …”

  “Leo’s dead. Dad?”

  I nodded. “Yes, Bella. That’s right.”

  She stayed still for a few seconds, staring at us, and then she began to tug anxiously at the rainbow of rubber bands around her wrist. And then her eyes began to tear as she tilted her head, as her lip quivered.

  “Bella, listen …”

  As I moved closer to hold her, she dove into Diddio’s arms, burying her face against his shoulder.

  “I just started liking him,” she cried.

  “I know, Gabby,” D replied, as he stroked her long brown hair. “He was crazy about you. Crazy and proud.”

  I watched, then I flipped the thin broadsheet page away from the manuscript of the novel we’d worked on, fought over, polished until it sparkled.

  “I’m sorry, Dennis,” she said as she sniffled. “Real, real sorry.”

  A moment later, I left the kitchen and went past Marina’s paintings to my office in back to call Leo’s family down in La Fourche Parish. I decided to start with his sister Ruthie, who sent him via FedEx every edition of the Times-Picayune. I could never figure if she thought Leo wanted to know what was happening back in New Orleans or whether she was trying to draw him home.

  And while I was on the phone, while I absently played with the computer mouse, I was telli
ng myself my daughter went to Diddio because he needed to be comforted.

  2

  “This is going to take all day,” I said.

  Leo’s office was too disorganized, too musty and unkempt, to be merely disheveled.

  Diddio looked up at me, seemingly cowed by the task ahead.

  “We need music,” he concluded, as he pushed off the smudged, off-white door frame and went to the jukebox.

  I silently bet on music from the ’60s. Diddio was nostalgic for an era that preceded him.

  In time, quiet chords on an acoustic guitar followed him as he returned. “The Allmans,” he said. “‘Melissa.’ If I’m going to be down, I’ll take all the company I can get.”

  He sat in Leo’s chair.

  “And sorry I bailed, man. I needed to move around a bit, you know.”

  “No apology necessary,” I told him. Yesterday, after Bella and her friend Daniel Wu had headed off to South Street, skateboards tucked under their arms, D and I shared sesame noodles at Café Franklin and then he disappeared. I spent the evening with Julie and a ’97 Bonnie Doon Syrah she brought over. We talked about Leo, then watched Bette Davis in The Corn Is Green on Channel 13 before I put her in a cab back to Kips Bay. Diddio covered a Freddie Mercury tribute at the old Felt Forum and crashed. I hadn’t realized he had found Leo’s body after he pulled an all-nighter on Friday.

  Now Julie was at Mass at the Church of Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and D and I faced a messy mountain of trash and grime, old bills in yellows and pinks, kitchen utensils, empty photo frames and articles torn hastily from nature magazines.

  “See anything you want?” I asked.

  “The ice pick?” Leo had some of his bills jabbed onto an old-style spindle, the kind OSHA banned in the ’70s.

  “It’s yours.” I was going to grab the old frying pan and hang it in my office.

  “You know,” he said, “Leo did the bills on Sunday.”

  “He did?” Not all of them, I thought.

  “Yep. Fifty-two of them a year.”

  I tapped my back pocket, where I’d tucked my checkbook. “Bills, then the desk?” I suggested.

  “Why not?” Diddio replied. “Who knows what shit we’ll find in there?”

  We went in, as the gritty singer gave way to a floating, melancholy electric guitar.

  All the incidentals, the remnants of an impoverished man’s life, were soberly placed in a crate that once held 18 Dixie long necks: dried seasonings, small knives for dicing, his favorite wooden spoon; Colgate tooth powder and a toothbrush, generic brands of over-the-counter cold medicines, a vial of Cipro I got him back in 2001; pencils used until they were nubs, old clotted Bic pens; and an old Motor Bus coffee can that held, I’d bet, more than five thousand pennies. I started another box for things less easily tossed aside: Verdi sung by Vargas, Donizetti by Fleming, Bartoli’s Caccini, an assortment of Pavarotti, and familiar Italian operas, jewel boxes and libretti in colorful cases; some New Orleans pop on cassettes nestled in chipped plastic. He had old Christmas cards that he’d tucked back into their envelopes, and birthday cards from Ruthie, and a copy of my Slippery Dick. Its limber spine told me he’d read it, and when I looked at it in my hands I saw not the brassy eyes of Connolly’s self-satisfied face, but Leo, abandoned and alone, looking for diversion in a book his friend had written.

  In the top drawer, which Diddio withdrew and, huffing, lugged out near the jukebox, we discovered Leo’s business tools: staples, paper clips, a roll of stamps and a payment book from the IRS. Leo was sending $1,100 a month, more than $13,000 a year, to the government. Juggling his intake somehow, he’d never missed a payment to the Feds.

  It was impossible to imagine Leo pulling an extra $1,100 a month out of the Tilt. He used to draw an afterwork crowd, young, well-dressed men and women dropping by to hang for a while on their way to the next stop. He greeted them with little enthusiasm, poor service, a very limited selection of cold beverages, and spicy beer nuts. What the Tilt once had going for it was its proximity to the World Trade Center and its brash investment bankers and bond traders who’d use the pool table and listen to Diddio’s choices on the jukebox, which had been written up in New York, Time Out and, incredibly, a Fodor’s guide to TriBeCa. At 8 P.M. or so, they’d clear out to head off to Montrachet, Nobu, Danube, Scalini Fedeli and the other three- and four-star restaurants in the neighborhood.

  Since the attacks on the Twin Towers, the Tilt rarely drew more than one or two passersby, a few local old-timers and some devoted travel-guide readers. Habits had changed, vile opportunism had descended, and little guys like Leo were paying.

  “Maybe you ought to shut it down, Leo,” I said casually, one dour afternoon while the recovery work was still going on down the street with flatbeds and dump trucks rumbling up Hudson, soot and soil kicking into the air with each pothole thud.

  “Hey, Terry,” Diddio said, jumping down from the pool table, “that’s rash, man.”

  “I ain’t closing your clubhouse, D,” Leo replied impatiently, without looking up from his newspaper. “Don’t you be worrying ’bout that.”

  “Whew!” Diddio wiped his brow, then he lay back on the table’s tatty green felt.

  Now, as a folksinger’s pretty contralto glided from the jukebox, Diddio jiggled the empty desk drawer back into its slot. We had the office neater and somewhat organized, under water stains on the leaky ceiling, above steel wool crammed into the holes where pipes disappeared into the floor. I’d written nine checks from my account to cover nearly $4,000 in bills, some of which were three months overdue.

  Diddio slid the drawer into its slot, then withdrew the last one. From where I stood, I saw a pair of Leo’s size 16EEE shoes and an old belt, curled and discarded.

  “This belt,” Diddio said, as he unfurled it, “could go around me twice.”

  At least. He had a 28-inch waist, as the leathery patch on the back of his black jeans announced.

  He crinkled his nose as he withdrew Leo’s black shoes. They were standard-issue rather than the orthopedic brand he’d taken to wearing in the past year or so. At one time, Leo had gotten the things resoled, and then he’d worn down the new bottoms as well.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey what?” I asked.

  “There’s something in these tugboats.”

  Gunboats, I thought, but said nothing. Diddio didn’t malaprop, even when coming down from an 18-hour buzz.

  He dropped the big shoes on Leo’s swivel chair. As I inched closer, I saw what he’d seen—a large manila envelope folded into each shoe.

  “Look at this,” he said, a lilt of wonder in his voice. “One for you, one for me.”

  I recognized Leo’s scrawl on the goodbye envelopes. He’d known he wasn’t going to last, and he’d prepared for his exit, writing letters to his friends so he could bid us farewell when he suddenly, though not unexpectedly, finalized his plan.

  He looked at me. “Hot shit.” Then he said, “What do you think?”

  “I think we open them.”

  “Now?”

  “And why not?”

  He shrugged, scratched at the top of his head. “Man, I don’t know. Like, do we need a ceremony or something? Something?”

  I took the envelope addressed to me. “Go change the music,” I suggested. “You’ve probably got something that’d fit.”

  He ran his fingers along his chin. Then: “Bingo!” And he left the office.

  I lifted Leo’s shoes from the chair, put them on the floor, and I sat, easing back as I opened the manila envelope he’d addressed to me.

  Terry:

  You know what this means, buddy. You know I ain’t going to tell you sorry, but I will say I tried not to lie. I didn’t have it in me anymore and that says it all, don’t it?

  I’m not giving anybody any advice, especially you. I never took yours and you never take anybody’s, so there’s no use. In other words, I’ll get right to it.

  I want you to keep an extra careful eye on D
iddio. He’s going to need you now more than he ever did. He’s a good kid. Lost like a little ol’ raggy dog, of course. But he’s got a good heart in him. If he finally finds himself that special girl he’s been looking for, you make sure she don’t do him like I got done.

  Which leads me to my major point—

  I want you to go find Loretta Jones.

  Bring her to the cops, make her pay for taking my money, my business and whatever all else it was kept me going in this world we’re living in. Go with it to wherever it goes. Don’t worry about nothing. Keep pushing until it’s all like it ought to be.

  You find Loretta, Terry Orr, and you make her pay, and you make anybody else pay who’s got to.

  You’ve been a good friend, Terry. Do this thing. Set it right.

  Leo Mallard

  When I finished reading, I folded the handwritten letter and slid it back into the manila envelope. I took a breath and then, as I leaned forward to slip out of the chair, as I prepared to open the other letter-sized envelope, I noticed the silence.

  Diddio had cut the music. I tried to remember if I’d even been in the Tilt with him when it was quiet.

  Before I could stand to join him by the jukebox, he appeared in the door frame. He seemed stunned and, though not quite frightened, he was less than himself, without his peculiar brand of confidence, his nutty swagger.

  “Terry.”

  “I know,” I said. “A voice from beyond. Leo.”

  What could Leo have written to him? Take care of Terry and Bella. Don’t smoke so much pot. Eat right. Exercise. Get some sun. Stop trying to fall in love. Just sidle up to a nice woman and let it flow.

  He couldn’t have asked him to find Loretta Jones.

  “Terry,” he swallowed, as he held up the big empty envelope. “He left me— He left me the Tilt.”

  “Wh— Huh?”

  He let himself fall against the frame. “Leo is giving me the Tilt.”

  “Christ.”

  “He says free and clear,” D said, flapping the envelope, apparently quoting Leo’s letter. “Free and … I mean, what’s that mean?”

  I shook my head. “You need a lawyer to tell you.” Given Leo’s tainted link to the IRS, I couldn’t begin to guess what the expression meant to him. “But I didn’t see a mortgage book or bills in there, so maybe—”