A Well-Known Secret

by Fusilli, Jim;

  “A lawyer. Man,” he groaned. “Here we go.”

  I stood, squeezed past him and went toward the long oak bar, the half-empty liquor bottles, the cash register, all of it. Yesterday’s FedEx package from Ruthie, blunt with a few editions of the Times-Picayune, sat unopened on a stool. The jukebox lid was up, like the wing of a DeLorean.

  Diddio followed me.

  His letter rested on the pool table.

  “Wow,” I said. “It’s yours. Wow.”

  I couldn’t figure what else I was supposed to say. Did Leo really believe Diddio could run a bar? Diddio, who asks Bella and Daniel to help him with his 1040, who forgets to do his laundry until all his black T-shirts and jeans are too shanked to re-wear? Diddio, who left a rental car outside a Holiday Inn in Cleveland, took a taxi to the airport and didn’t remember the white Malibu until he was back in TriBeCa for nearly a week. Who twice had his ATM card seized because he punched in the wrong four-digit code.

  I wiped my moist forehead on the short sleeve of my gray T-shirt. It was another unbearably muggy day already, and the overhead fan barely caused a ripple in the thick air.

  “He liked you, D,” I said finally.

  “You think?”

  Yes, and he saw in you virgin veins of self-reliance and undiscovered skills in management. I guess.

  He followed me. “You got two envelopes?”

  I stopped, opened the second, let the contents tumble onto the green felt.

  A photo, which landed face-down. A key, and—

  “Money,” Diddio said, pointing.

  —a short stack of bills held together with a rubber band.

  “Benjamins.” He frowned as he juggled a cube of blue chalk. “I didn’t get money.”

  “You got a bar,” I told him. “Don’t bitch.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said quickly. “It’s just—”

  I flipped over the photo.

  “Loretta,” Diddio said, as the chalk flew out of his hand.

  In the glory days of Big Chief’s. She was in front of the restaurant, standing on Greenwich. The sun was over the buildings, on its way to the Jersey palisades, and she was in raw light. Her lazy hound dog, a big blond thing, lay at her feet.

  “She was pretty good-looking,” Diddio observed. “Yeah, I remember now.”

  I nodded. Loretta had blond hair with a touch of red—in someone of a more genteel disposition, it would be called strawberry blond—pale blue eyes, high cheekbones under a faint complexion, a sprinkling of light freckles, thin lips often drawn tight, even in this photo. When she stood next to Leo, she seemed tiny, but she was about Diddio’s height and she was well built, thin in the hips but fulsome on top.

  I noticed that the photo had been taken before the hard, weathered look of the persistent drinker had marred her features.

  “Never did seem too happy, though,” D added. “For a woman who had a dog.”

  “She was a hard-ass.” And a good-looking woman who knew it. “He wants me to find her.”

  He bent down to pick up the chipped cube. “Why?”

  “Bring her to justice, I guess.” I shrugged. “Something.”

  As he stood, I noticed that his face was an odd color, as the blood had rushed to challenge his pallor. “That’s what the money’s for,” he said.

  “I guess.” I lifted the stack.

  “The key. It’s for the bar.”

  “Your bar.”

  “Holy moley.”

  “Tell me about it,” I agreed.

  “Maybe that’s why Leo wants you to go get Loretta,” he said. “So she don’t swoop down and try to take the Tilt from me. You know?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” But it was more likely he wanted his revenge dished as cold as could be—from beyond the grave. Not that Loretta would let her guard down, even with Leo gone. D’s theory had one thing in its favor: Loretta was a rank opportunist. A nickel never rolled off a table that she didn’t grab before it hit the floor.

  He looked at me, looked at the money in my hands. The chalk cube once again fell to the grubby linoleum.

  “Interesting,” I said. “A man owes the IRS, yet he can keep five Gs in his desk for who knows how long.”

  D started to crawl under the pool table.

  “Leave it,” I instructed. Waving the money, I added, “I’ll buy you a new one.”

  A muffled “thanks” came up from the tainted linoleum, from beneath hardwood and coarse green felt.

  We’ve changed places: Bella was now back in my office and I was at the kitchen table with her laptop, her Applied Botany text, her marble notebooks, Cedar Pointe pencils and, look at that, an old-fashioned ditto sheet of questions, purple ink on white paper. “Explain in detail the primary differences and similarities between angiosperms and gymnosperms.”

  I wonder if it still has that smell, the chemical—

  “We’re all set,” she announced, returning just as I had lifted the sheet to my nose.

  “Good.” The central air gave the house a cool, spring-like amiability. Over on West Broadway, grown men in tattered sandals and Yankees T-shirts were jumping under the fire hydrant’s arching spray, while on Chambers, window fans were a red-hot commodity, despite the 500 percent markup.

  “Tuesday morning, EWR to MSY. Five tickets.”

  “Five? Who—”

  “Dennis. Me, you. Julie. Daniel,” she counted, holding up her fingers. “Five.”

  “Julie?”

  “Dad, you bring your girlfriend to a friend’s funeral. Obvious.”

  She nudged me with her hip. She wanted her chair. Bella couldn’t do her homework in any other place in the house, nor could she do it without her soft Cedar Pointes. Nor, lately, without removing a yellow rubber band from her wrist and putting it in a perfect circle near the center of the table.

  At least she wasn’t wearing her fedora.

  As I stood, I said, “Bella, let’s hold off with the girlfriend stuff.”

  “Yeah, right,” she replied. “You’ve been seeing her three times a week for over a year, but she’s not your girlfriend. OK.”

  “She’s my friend. But that’s it.”

  She reached to boost the sound coming from the little speakers in her laptop. Pulsing dance rhythms made by machines invaded the room.

  “And Daniel?” I reached over her shoulder and cut the volume.

  With a few flicks of her long fingers, her mother’s long fingers, she put the music on pause.

  “I need company.”

  “What about D? And me?”

  “You like Daniel.”

  “Daniel’s fine.”

  Actually, Daniel was much more than fine. He was bright, earnest, witty and thoroughly devoted to my daughter.

  “But,” I continued, “we’re going to a funeral.”

  “He knows how to behave.”

  “Bella …”

  She tapped on the botany textbook. “Dad, I’ve got to do this and it’s not easy.”

  I assumed she’d chosen the class because her Aunt Rafaela in Foggia ran a florist shop, was a passionate gardener and was Bella’s closest blood link to her late mother.

  But she picked it, she said, because she thought it wouldn’t be easy. Schoolwork wasn’t much of a challenge for Bella, even the aggressive curriculum at Walt Whitman. I’d been fighting off suggestions to skip Bella ahead at least a grade since she was five years old.

  Marina blamed me for her precociousness.

  She said, her Italian accent light, charming, “Who gives a baby a book on Galileo?”

  Time-Life had this series … “It’s got pictures in it,” I explained. “Besides, he’s Italian, right?”

  “She’s reading it,” Marina replied. Paint had landed on her denim carpenter’s jeans, swooshes and dabs of reds, oranges, vibrant greens. “She wants a telescope.”

  “Oh, Marina, don’t exagger—”

  “Terry, she is three years old!”

  Marina once said that I didn’t want a baby, a little da
ughter. She said I wanted a new friend.

  Not true. Not then. Having a baby daughter was great.

  So was having a baby son.

  “So five to New Orleans?” I asked.

  “Dad, please,” Bella pleaded without looking up from her text, her scentless mimeograph sheet. “I have to do this, OK?”

  She reached out with a finger and let the music play.

  3

  Newark Airport had improved since my last trip, whenever that was: monorails, which Bella and Diddio found way outrageous and Daniel boarded with a knowing nod, as if he approved; yes, yes, it’s fine. As we entered the terminal, we were greeted by forced air, a vague scent of fuel and the kind of mild tension I recalled from the days when I traveled playing b-ball or when Marina went to her openings, with Bella and me tagging along, before Davy was born.

  “I got you a Sporting News and an American Legacy,” Julie said as she passed me a yellow plastic sack that wore the vendor’s logo.

  I juggled my suit bag to the other hand and took the magazines. “What you get? What’s— Mad?”

  She smiled. “That’s for Gabriella. Or Dennis.” She showed me a copy of Country Living.

  “Nothing for prosecutors? Miranda Monthly, Suspended Sentence, Perp Walk Weekly?”

  “Pul-lease. No mention of work, the D.A.’s or Centre Street for the next few days,” she said. “I’m paying my respects to your dear friend Leo and his family, and then I’m getting you to show me a good time.”

  “There’s a good time in New Orleans?” I asked.

  “So I’m told.”

  We were greeted at our gate by college-bound students, sleeping on inflated collars, tongues lolling, their legs curled over armrests; and urgent cell-phone shouters in business suits who gestured as if they were conducting the conversation. Discarded pages of USA Today cluttered the waiting area, as did carry-ons of all sizes, their handles high, antenna-like. Ignoring instructions, people began inching toward the passageway as soon as the first steward waddled down the ramp, and fit young men who hadn’t yet considered having children oozed into the line for the elderly needing assistance and families traveling with small kids.

  I was watching Bella distribute the magazines, offering the Mad as well as a block of Dentyne to D, who had his Utz baseball cap pulled low to his brow, when I heard my name amid the crackle from overhead speakers.

  Bella and Diddio snapped their heads toward me, while Daniel frowned in curiosity.

  Who do I know, I thought, who isn’t here?

  At the check-in counter, a beefy man in white short sleeves handed me a red courtesy phone.

  “Hel—”

  “Get me my fuckin’ money, Terry.” A harsh, throaty voice, raspy, shrill.

  “Who—”

  “It’s mine, and you know it’s mine.”

  “Loretta?”

  “Everything he had is mine, Terry.”

  “Loretta, where are you?” My four companions were staring at me, waiting for information. I waved at them, nodding, shrugging to tell them there was nothing to worry about.

  “Don’t you never mind, and don’t change the subject,” she barked. “Just get me my money. Don’t leave New Or—”

  “Loretta, he’s got shit,” I told her. “And if I find he had a fuckin’ dime I wouldn’t turn it over to you.”

  “You think all he had was that piece-of-shit bar? Terry? Terry?”

  They were boarding our row, and Bella, hand on hip, demanded I catch up.

  “Terry!”

  “Loretta, go sober up, all right?”

  I returned the handset to the thick man behind the counter. Loretta was still spewing when he dropped it back in the cradle.

  “First wife?” he asked.

  He must’ve seen me with Julie and the three kids, one of whom was pushing 40.

  “Somebody’s,” I told him. “Not mine.”

  “Poor soul.”

  I nodded. “You got that right,” I said, as I went to join the jagged line, trying not to think about a gin-soaked woman calling airports at 8:30 in the morning.

  I wound up next to pudgy Daniel, halfway toward the back of the narrow jet, but in a deep bulkhead. I could see Diddio four rows up, his head against the drawn plastic window shade, black cap tugged over his eyes. Bella and Julie were across the aisle from the critic, with Bella at the window. As we lifted off, Julie turned, smiled to me. In her pale blue blouse under a blue sweater and charcoal-gray slacks, she looked like an apt businesswoman who the company let bring her child on the trip. I opened Slaughter at Kinmel Hall and quickly fell back into the story of duplicity, cowardice and mass murder in North Wales in 1919. It was so damned engaging that I only thought about Marina, Davy and Weisz, the psychotic who killed them, every 20 seconds instead of every 10.

  And I was still deep in the book, ignoring the white-noise rush of stale air in the cabin, the dried pancakes, the greasy sausage links, the hapless comedy on the small overhead screen, when I felt a tap on my arm.

  “Will you be doing your private investigation work while we’re in New Orleans?” Daniel Wu asked.

  I turned to him. For the first two hours of the flight, he said nothing, as he contentedly watched streaks of rose-colored clouds, nursed a bottle of water and politely thumbed through the in-flight magazine and American Legacy. Daniel was by nature courteous and thoughtful, and behind dark, twinkling eyes nearly hidden by his high, rounded cheeks, seemingly bemused by all he witnessed. Today, under a bulky purple long-sleeved T, he wore big, baggy red shorts and his knees were smooth, with dry wrinkles where his leg bent along the contours of the uncomfortable seat. His black high-topped sneakers, highly stylized with violet plastic squiggles, bold white lines and red Velcro, were placed neatly under the seat in front of him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, sliding the ticket stub between the book’s pages.

  “You’ll be working in New Orleans?”

  “I suppose you could call it that,” I replied.

  “After a fashion.” He smiled.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s an expression,” he told me. “After a fashion.”

  “You like it?”

  He said he did.

  “Well, then, I’ll be working. After a fashion.”

  “And what will you be doing, if I may ask?”

  Daniel was curious, more so than any of Bella’s friends. In him, it was an admirable trait. He seemed to want to understand the world he inhabited, and no fact was too obscure to escape his interest.

  “I’ll be looking for a woman,” I said. “Loretta Jones.”

  “The one on the phone?”

  “As a matter of fact—”

  “What did she do?” He shifted his rotund body in his seat so he could face me. I lifted the armrest so he’d be more comfortable.

  I figured she’d learned of Leo’s death from one of her old boyfriends in the First Precinct, but that wasn’t what Daniel wanted to know.

  “She embezzled a bunch of money,” I told him. “Perpetuated a fraud against the government. Her husband and the government.”

  “Perpetuated a fraud.” He chuckled. “I like that too.”

  I tried to suppress a smile as I returned to Bodelwyddan.

  “Do you have clearance to bring a gun on board?”

  This time I put my thumb between the pages. “I’m not carrying,” I said.

  He frowned. “Is that dangerous?”

  I shook my head.

  “It could be,” he continued. “This woman, we know she is troubled, and now that you are looking for her …”

  “She’s troubled?”

  “Stealing is not normal. Lying, not normal. She might even be capable of far worse and, for you, that is a more complicated issue.”

  “That’s it.” He had her right, did Daniel Wu.

  He said, “Someone who is a thief and a liar has no regard for property or promises. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I’d agree, Daniel.”

&n
bsp; “What else is there?”

  “Well, no one’s said she’s ever killed anybody,” I said, as I stared at the paperback.

  “Not such a giant step …”

  As he paused to consider his own comment, I flipped open—

  “And it’s a strange city for you.”

  “Huh?”

  He repeated, “It’s a strange city for you.”

  I tried to joke my way out of the conversation. “Well, Daniel, a lot of people say New Orleans is a strange city in itself.”

  “No, what I mean is, Gabriella says you’ve never been there.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Backup.”

  “Excuse—”

  “You’ll need backup.”

  “Not for this I won’t, Daniel,” I told him, perhaps too curtly.

  He paused, frowned. “Am I interrupting?”

  I wiggled the book above my lap, my jeans.

  “I’m inquisitive,” he said with a shrug. “It’s me.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Oh.”

  For all his cheeriness, his innate optimism, Daniel could be sensitive, Bella reported one evening.

  “But, it’s fine, Daniel. Go on, if you want.”

  He turned, his shoulders slumping. “I’ve found it useful to ask,” he said softly.

  “It’s good to ask.” I nodded. “But sometimes it’s good to observe and see if you can figure it out by yourself.”

  He paused for a moment, pondering, tossing it around.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Well, I would be inclined to say it’s better to ask for help, to cooperate,” he replied wistfully. “But I’m going to think about what you said.”

  He nodded and shifted, and I opened Pomerantz’s book. Where was I? Oh yeah, a frigid winter in early 1919 and British troops—

  Daniel chuckled. “In itself. A strange city in itself.” Then he pushed his small round thumb toward the window, the frail open skies. “I’ll watch the clouds.”

  Before checking in, we paused for a moment to organize in the thin shadows under an ornate verandah, as the Louisiana sun baked the cast-iron railings of a shuttered restaurant on the other side of St. Charles. I ran my finger under the collar of my blue Oxford and rolled my sleeves up an extra notch, as Julie removed her thin sweater and Diddio tugged rapidly at his black T-shirt. Our silent agreement: We’d gotten off the plane and stepped into a shvitz.Late summer in Manhattan felt balmy compared to midday off the Warehouse District. One of us was bound to say it, so I went first.