I called Mom’s cell phone and she picked up on the first ring, just as she always did. (Mom was known to interrupt her class lectures to speak to me, which I’m sure her overworked graduate students didn’t mind.). “Nancy, dear,” she sang in her thick upper-Massachusetts drawl. “I was wondering when I would hear from you. You’ve ignored my messages for days.” She was exaggerating, as per usual.
“Mom, chill out. You just emailed me last night. And I just now picked up your voicemail from this morning. I do have a life, you know.”
“Bullshit. You’re a college student with zero responsibilities.”
I cast my eyes skyward. Already cursing in her second sentence. Mom was in rare form today. “For your information, Mom, I have term papers due, a midterm to study for, and two freelance journalism assignments. Plus work. I do pay my own rent and utilities, you know. And I have to study hard enough to keep my scholarship since you and Dad can’t afford to pay my full tuition here.”
I heard Mom suck in her breath, which meant my last remark had hit exactly where I’d wanted it to. It bothered Mom to no end that I didn’t live the life of privilege she had at my age. “If you’d just gone to Beverly, where your father and I have faculty tuition benefits, you wouldn’t have that problem,” she said for at least the eighty-fifth time this year. “You could have stayed home and lived with us, and focused entirely on your studies. You wouldn’t have to take all that goddamned sidework and spend your weekends slinging cheap beers at people.”
“Mom, these are important writing gigs. I just got a gig with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A feature-length investigative piece. On spec, of course, but---”
“On spec? You mean that you might research and write the damn thing, and then not get paid a dime? Oh, Nancy, you know better than to do that sort of thing. That’s basically slave labor. If they want you to write for them, they can offer you a regular job, with salary and benefits.”
“Mom, we’ve been through this a million times. I’m going to be a journalist, and I need to have a lot of freelance clips if I want to ever get a full-time staff writer job. It’s just how the industry works.”
“We won’t discuss that right now, dear. Let’s just get down to business. Are you coming home for Columbus Day or not? The Connors were asking about you just the other day. You remember their son, Robert. He’s still single, you know. I really think you should consider dating him when you move back home after graduation.”
I thought about blurting out that Robert was gay, but he hadn’t gone public with that information yet, and I wasn’t comfortable outing him to my mom even though anyone who wasn’t blind, deaf and dumb had probably figured it out about him a long time ago. Robert had his right ear pierced, talked like a Fire Island waiter, loved Judy Garland, plus he was majoring in drama at Yale.
“Mom, first of all, Robert and I are just friends. Second of all, I’m not moving back home after graduation. I’m planning on getting a job and living on my own, just like you and Dad always said you wanted me to. Third of all---”
“We do want you to get a job and live on your own, Nancy. We would just prefer you do it back home in Boston instead of some Godforsaken uncivilized place like Cleveland, Ohio.”
Oh, not this again, I thought, biting my tongue against the first snide remark that came to mind. “Third of all, I’m not coming home for Columbus Day weekend this year. You see, I’ve met someone, and---“
Mom shrieked like an adolescent. “You’ve met someone? You mean, you’re dating?”
“Well, it’s still in the very early stages, but---“
Mom wasn’t about to let me get a word in edgewise. “Oh Nancy, that’s just wonderful. Your father and I, we were getting very worried about you. We were beginning to wonder if perhaps you preferred women. Which would have been totally fine with us, mind you----wait a minute. You aren’t dating a woman, are you?”
“No, Mom, I’m not. This person I’ve met is definitely male.” And also definitely much older than I, and kind of weird, and possibly involved in shady international activities, and probably would not be the type I would feel comfortable bringing home to meet my parents. But we didn’t have to discuss any of that right now. The important part was I’d gotten my mom to shut up. Everything else was just details. “I’m really not sure where this relationship will go, but I’m just trying to keep my options open at this point. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course I understand, dear. I’m just so glad you’ve finally gotten enough sense to realize that it’s perfectly normal for a young woman your age to be dating. Honestly, your father and I were talking just the other day about how you work yourself practically to death and never take time out to have any fun.”
“Mom, I have plenty of fun,” I retorted. “My idea of fun is just different from most peoples’, that’s all.” Most people didn’t find lying around the apartment on weekends reading Victorian novels and watching endless Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs DVD marathons fun. But I did, and what on earth was wrong with that?
What, indeed. Even I was having a hard time justifying my lifestyle to myself these days. It was high time for a change. “Anyhoo, Mom, I’ve gotta go. I need to go meet with my boss for a bit, and then I’m um, I’m scheduled to have dinner with the, ahh, gentleman that I’ve met recently.” There. I’d let the cat out of the bag. Though I used the term “gentleman” loosely. Peter Rostovich could only be called a gentleman in the nineteenth-century European aristocratic sense. You know, the gentlemen who got to call themselves as such while living essentially above the law and without moral consequences for such things as, say, knocking up one of their housemaids or keeping a secret bondage dungeon in their manor houses. . . .
“Nancy? Nancy, are you there? Hello?” Mom’s voice cut into my racy thoughts. Good grief, what on earth had just come over me?
“I’m here, Mom. Look, I really need to go----”
“I know, I know, you’ve got a hot date. It’s so nice to hear you’re actually going out on a Friday night instead of serving cheap cocktails to white trash in sleazy bars. My little girl is finally growing up. Why, just the other day I----”
“I’m hanging up now, Mom. Bye.” My pizza margherita was getting cold, and I still had to meet with Benny. God only knew what I’d find out about Rostovich from him.
I scarfed down the rest of my dinner, flagged the waitress for the check, and headed out.
SIX
“Oh yeah, Pete and me go way back. All the way back to my New York days.”
My boss Benny Logan sat across from me at one of the many high-top tables by his bar and grill’s grimy front windows, the ones tall enough for old-fashioned barstool seats and a footrest below. They were part of my usual cocktailing section, and often proved lucrative on Friday and Saturday nights thanks to their proximity to the bigscreen TVs. My typical customers at those tables looked like younger versions of Benny----overweight, bearded, and wearing dingy Cleveland Indians or Detroit Tigers ballcaps. Benny was breaking his usual tradition today and wearing an Ohio State cap instead.
“I never knew you lived in New York.”
Benny took a long chug of his Miller Lite tallboy bottle. “Oh yeah, I spent some time there in the late 90s,” he said. “I was in my early 30s then, and had just gotten out of the corporate grind. I wanted to go into business for myself, but first I helped my older brother open a bar on the Lower East Side. That’s where I met Peter. He used to hang out there a lot, back when he was first getting started as an artist. He and my brother ended up going into business together. Or rather I should say, he saved my brother’s ass.”
That got my attention. I shoved my digital recorder across the table so as to not miss a word. Fortunately Benny had agreed to make our entire conversation on the record. (Being a reliable cocktail waitress who’d never missed a shift up to now had certain advantages were journalism was concerned.) “How did he save your brother’s ass, exactly?”
He polished off the bee
r, cracked open another from the stack he had lined up on the edge of the table---Benny never bothered to hide the fact he was a raging alcoholic from anyone---and guzzled half of it in one sitting. He did this at the beginning of every shift, and never showed any ill effects from the massive amounts of alcohol, other than the spiderweb of broken capillaries on his nose and forehead. “My brother was about the lose the bar,” he said. “He’d opened it on a shoestring budget and the first month or so didn’t go well. He didn’t realize---we didn’t realize---how hard it is to open a bar in Manhattan without the right connections. You go in thinking it’ll be easy to do business in a place like that, with so many people crammed into such a small area, and so many of them heavy drinkers. Those Wall Street guys love booze, dontchya know. But we didn’t account for, well, other factors.”
“What other factors?”
“Oh, well, the Mafia, for one. Protection money, for another. And we didn’t know you had to pay off certain people to keep your liquor supply up, especially in the beginning, when your competition really wants you to fail. Pete brought us up to speed on all of that. He was---is---a really street-smart guy.”
“What do you mean, street-smart?”
“He was a tough kid. Street kid, really. Came here with his mom from Russia---“
“Ukraine.”
“Wherever, it’s all the same to me. Came here from the Ukraine with his mom when he was about fourteen. Didn’t speak a word of English when he got here, or so I’ve heard. They lived in Brooklyn, down near Brighton Beach with the rest of the Russian immigrants. But Pete usually skipped out on school to hang around the Lower East Side. He got in with some friends there who taught him things about how stuff worked around the neighborhood.” He paused, studied the label on his beer bottle.
“Go on.”
“I think Peter had some connections from the old country. He used to come hang out in the bar when we first opened---he was maybe twenty or twenty-one at the time---and just talk to my brother and me while we stood behind the bar waiting for customers. He always wore these raggedy old grunge-type clothes and a filthy green knit ski cap, kind of a Kurt Cobain kind of look. We honestly thought he was homeless for a while. He never drank anything but tap water, but he was a nice enough kid so we let him hang around as much as he wanted.
“One day he overheard my brother and me talking about closing the bar---we’d maybe been open for six weeks by then, we were out of money and almost out of booze, and nobody would extend us any credit---and Pete sidled right up and said he’d take care of it for us. Just like that.”
I tried to imagine a younger version of Peter, dressed as a grunge dude and professing that he could save a Manhattan bar from ruin, and chuckled. “Did you laugh at him?”
“We did at first, but it didn’t take long for us to figure out he meant what he said. He showed up the next day with a full liquor truck that made a big delivery on credit. And the next night, the place was chock full of customers. And not just any old neighborhood people either---these were high-end suit types. Wall Street guys with lots of money. We made a killing that night, enough for us to pay for the liquor delivery, all our back bills, and keep the bar open. And Pete Rostovich arranged all of it.”
“How?”
Benny just shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. I just know that Pete Rostovich is a guy that can get these sorts of things done.”
“You mean you didn’t question him about it?”
“No. Why question results?”
I chuckled again. “Didn’t it seem somewhat shady to you?”
He shrugged again. “Nancy, it was the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 90s. The whole damn neighborhood was shady. It’s how things were back then. In my business, there are certain things you just don’t ask about.”
“So, um, how did you pay Rostovich back? I’m assuming he didn’t just up and do all of this for nothing.” No guy who drove an Alfa Romeo around Cleveland and stayed in the Ritz-Carlton presidential suite did stuff for free.
“He basically said we could pay him back by making him an equal silent partner in the bar. So we did. He got one-third of the bar’s profits every month from then on. He eventually bought me out of my share in the business. I used the money to move back here to Cleveland and open my own place. We still stay in touch.” Benny polished off his second beer and started a third. “So, how do you know Pete, anyway?”
“I just met him, um, recently.”
Benny’s thick salt-and-pepper eyebrows raised. “Is that so? I got the impression you’d known him for a long time.”
My stomach fluttered a little “Whatever gave you that impression?”
He fiddled with the label on one of the empty beer bottles before answering. “Just the way Pete talked about you, is all. I’ve never seen him talk about any woman the way he talked about you.”
I was tempted to switch the digital recorder off then, but I stifled the urge and pressed on. “What do you mean by that?”
He sucked in a deep breath, blew it out. “Pete’s not really what I would call a sentimental guy. He’s always been very close to the vest. You know, private. Doesn’t reveal much about himself, never has. But when he came over here this morning---“
“He came over here? I thought he just called you.”
Benny shook his head. “Nope. He showed up on my doorstep this morning at around eight. You know, at my place over the bar. Got me outa bed. Said it was really important he talk to me about you.”
I sank backward in my chair, feeling as if I’d just had the wind knocked out of me. About me. Rostovich had dragged his former business partner---who I knew full well never rose before noon---out of bed to talk about me? But why? What was so special about me, anyway? “What did he want to know?”
Benny smiled. “Oh, this and that.”
“Tell me.”
He wadded up the portion of the beer label he’d torn from the bottle and tossed it into a nearby ashtray. “I’m not at liberty to say very much. He swore me to secrecy.”
I leaned forward, my Spidey sense tingling. “Is that so? And why is that?”
“Pete and I are old friends, and I won’t betray his confidence,” Benny shot back, though his eyes darted anywhere but back at mine. His forehead broke out into a sweat and he began to fidget. That meant he was hiding something rather big. I was confident I could wring it out of him.
“Come on, Benny,” I said, turning on the sweet talk. “We go way back, too. Remember when I worked that double shift during the Super Bowl last year so you wouldn’t have to close when half the waitstaff came down with the flu?”
Benny drummed his knuckles on the table and shifted back and forth in his seat. I could tell I was wearing him down already. “What about the time I came in early to help you cover shifts after three other waitresses quit in the same week? Remember the week of the Christmas blizzard, when we had a bunch of Case Western students stranded on campus and all coming over here to drink, and you didn’t have enough people to take care of them? I totally saved your ass that weekend. You even said so yourself.”
Benny took off his ballcap, ran his fingers through his sweaty graying hair, replaced it. “All right, Nancy, all right. You’re right, I do owe you one. I’ll let you in on a little bit of what Pete and I talked about. But not everything. I’ve got loyalties to both of you.”
“That’s more like it.”
He shoved my digital recorder back across the table at me. “On one condition though. Turn that thing off. I don’t want this to be on the record. I don’t want any kind of proof out there that I was the one who told you any of this.”
That got my attention. There was very little that fazed Benny Logan. He was a ham-fisted, tough-talking barkeeper if there ever was one. If he was that worried about someone finding out he’d spilled the beans on Peter Rostovich, they had to be some pretty damn good beans indeed.
Benny glanced over both shoulders to make sure the
bar was still deserted. “He wanted to know if you were single,” he said. “I told him that as far as I knew, you were. And he wanted to know if I was willing to have you stop working here altogether, and if not, what it would take for him to change my mind.”
I blinked. This wasn’t exactly the kind of information I’d been hoping for. I’d wanted to uncover something along the lines of international criminal intrigue or something, not independent confirmation that a guy just wanted a date. Though I was surprised about the second part. “What do you mean, he asked if you were willing to have me stop working here?”
Benny stared at his hands. “He asked point-blank if I would fire you, as a personal favor to him.”
“What?”
He raised both hands in surrender. “I told him that no, I wouldn’t fire you, because you’re one of my best waitresses. Then he asked if he could buy out your contract.”
“But I don’t have a contract.”
“That’s right, you don’t. So I told him no to that, too.”
“And how did he respond?”
“Well, he got rather irate. He said that I owed him a favor, that I’d owed it to him for a long time, and now he was calling it in. He said that no girlfriend of his was going to work as a cheap cocktail waitress.”
Girlfriend? “Um, I’m not his girlfriend.”
“Well, that’s not what he said. You know what else he said?”
“No, what?”
“He said that you were better than that sort of work. That you were better than this place, that you were destined for much bigger things. He insulted me, ya know. I’ve never seen that kind of behavior before outa him. Kinda took me by surprise.”
A sudden chill swept through me. “I see.”
Benny tucked into yet another beer. “He finally backed off on that last part. But he told me the least I could do was take you off the floor for tonight, so I did. Cheri’s covering your station.”
I took several deep cleansing breaths. At one level, I was furious. Who in the hell did this guy think I was? Some piece of chattel? He had absolutely no business barging into my place of employment and demanding I be fired, girlfriend or no girlfriend.
Domino (The Domino Trilogy) Page 10