The Little Brothers

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Ruggio might have come home, but Marks doubted it. The feeling of a lone woman watching in the darkness was very strong. He went to the phone booth on the next corner. Information got him the number of Alberto Ruggio and the operator dialed it for him. He let the phone ring eight times and thought of the woman nursing the child. No one answered.

  He contacted communications. Nothing yet on Ruggio.

  He decided it was worth the manpower to keep the Grossman premises under surveillance for the next few hours, and having arranged it, waited himself for the arrival of the first detail. As the minutes dragged on, he thought of the loneliness of a one man job, the stakeout. His was one of the last of the solitary police operations. Even the patrolmen, for the most part, walked in pairs. He had himself once thought that all Manhattan was his beat. In his college days he had walked the city day and night, never thinking he would become a policeman. Like his father and his grandfather, he had studied law, but he had not practiced. He would not have made a good lawyer: even now he was hung up between prosecution and defense. Which ought not to make for a good cop either, although he was well aware he was so regarded by the men at the top.

  At the precinct headquarters Marks asked the desk officer if he might see the record of the previous night’s complaints. He studied the entry on Bonelli. A Mrs. A. Niccoli of 1893 Elizabeth Street had called the police at twelve:forty-five. The patrol car reached the scene seven minutes later. Bonelli, Senior, was lying in the third-floor hall, unconscious and bleeding from a head wound. An officer had called Bellevue Hospital, and while waiting the arrival of the ambulance, had taken a statement from Bonelli’s son, Ricardo Junior. He had pushed his father, who was trying to get him back into their own apartment, and his father had crashed through the railing to the floor below. Junior had stayed with him until the police arrived. The complete entry: this was not the way Ric had told it at the clubhouse. In the context of the Grossman case, there were many unasked questions: how long a time elapsed between the beginning of the quarrel and the end of it? When was the window broken? How long was Ric out of the house, presumably getting wine? Where did he get it? Where was he at eleven-thirty, which was the approximate time Phillips had seen a boy whose description seemed to fit Bonelli? Nor was there mention of his hitting his father over the head with the bottle.

  Marks asked the desk man if he had been on duty at the time.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why wasn’t an assault charge placed against young Bonelli?”

  The officer turned the docket around and read it, trying to refresh his memory. “They must’ve figured it was an accident.”

  Marks said nothing. He remembered the boast very clearly, and the top Brother’s reprimand for the obscenity.

  “Any follow-up on the father’s condition?”

  There was none. Nor was there a statement from Mrs. Niccoli in the record. Was it all bad police work? Marks didn’t think so. He had the feeling that there was a reason behind every apparent goof. He had a feeling: it was an expression the inspector hated. Then scratch it, he’d say.

  Marks said, “There are six youngsters I’d like to screen for witnesses in the morning, sergeant. Can we arrange it here?”

  “Give me their names and addresses and I’ll set it up for you, lieutenant.”

  14

  ONLY A FEW DOORS separated Angie’s building from the one where Ric lived. When Ric was not at work, Angie always went around the block to avoid his building. Now he wanted to avoid Ric more than ever. He wanted to get home and hide the knife in a place where he knew it would be safe. But old Mrs. Niccoli saw him.

  “Angie, come here!”

  There was no sign of Ric. He went to her. She was a terrible woman, always picking at him for information about his mother, about whether his father got re-married, which meant divorce. Either way, he was living in sin. Angie knew she made fun of Mr. Rotelli to the other women, the way she imitated how he used his hands. She was sitting on her own chair on the sidewalk outside the vestibule. A couple of other women were with her, sitting on their own chairs. “Your mother isn’t home,” she said.

  “Okay,” Angie said. “Thanks.” He didn’t know what for, but he said it automatically.

  “She went in a taxi with Mr. Rotelli.”

  “I know,” he said, just to get away, and started for his own building.

  “Ric’s looking for you.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to answer. He knew why he hated her the most: whenever he got past without meeting Ric, she was there to let him know he hadn’t escaped for long. Halfway up his own stairs he met Ric coming down.

  “Where you been?” Ric demanded.

  “At my hideout.” He wasn’t ever going to tell Ric where that was.

  “The Little Brothers are down on you you know that, don’t you?”

  “I can’t help it,” Angie said.

  “The cops coming in like that—and you thinking it was me on the phone. I bet you still think it was, right?”

  Angie stepped on a bug and didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t trust that guy Marks, the lieutenant. He’s got it in for us. You can tell.”

  “Who’s us?”

  “Italians, I mean. The other guy, you could tell even from him. My old man’s still in the hospital. Let’s go over to my place.”

  “I’m too tired.”

  “We got to talk private.”

  There was no one home at Angie’s either, but he did not know how he would get Ric out of the house once he got in. He couldn’t count on his mother coming home early on a Friday night. He went back down the stairs ahead of Ric and put his hand to the knife to make sure it was securely sheathed inside his jeans.

  Mrs. Niccoli said, “How’s papa, Ric?”

  “Coming along fine, thank you.” Ric said it like a Little Brother, Angie realized. Halfway up the stairs, Ric muttered, “The old bitch.” He stopped at the next landing. “Right here’s the spot where they folded him up on the stretcher.” Somebody had put in a larger light bulb than Angie had ever seen in a hallway before. There were dark stains on the floor, probably wine, but they looked like blood. Ric stepped under the light. He stuck out his arm and pulled up the sleeve. “Look.”

  Angie saw a deep, angry scratch. He thought instantly of Mr. Grossman’s cat.

  Ric was watching his face and he liked what he saw. He laughed as though he was going out of his mind. “Where do you think I got it?”

  Angie shrugged. He couldn’t have got the words out if he’d had to. It was another of Ric’s old tricks, only the situation was a lot different. I dare you, Ric was always saying for as long as Angie could remember him: I dare you to tell on me, always knowing Angie wouldn’t, even if he had to take the blame himself. But the scratch was real.

  “From the bottle when it broke,” Ric said when he stopped laughing. On the next landing he pointed out a repair in the railing. “That’s where he tumbled over. I don’t care. He had it coming to him. He never lets up on me. From a little kid—‘You mother-killer.’ How’d you like somebody saying that to you all the time?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Angie said. He didn’t think he was going to be able to stand it if Ric started that story over again that night, about his mother’s death when he was born. Angie wanted to think about the scratch, but not while he was with Ric. He wanted to get off by himself and think out what really happened at the Little Brothers’ if he could. From the point where Louis started asking Ric questions. Everything changed when the cops came. He waited while Ric unlocked the door. Maybe Ric had wanted the cops to come, to pin Angie down. Maybe he’d called them too. Ric, the informer. Angie wished he could take out his knife and put it to Ric’s back and say, Tell the truth. Ridiculous.

  The lights were on in the Bonelli apartment. It was filthy, especially compared to Angie’s. There were dirty clothes on the floor, and paper plates with stale food on them and flies all over. The glass still lay by the broken window.

  “My s
ister used to try and make it up to me sometimes. Then she’d get mad at having to take care of me. Now she’s such a rich bitch she won’t even come home on San Gennaro’s Day. Jesus, how I hate them all.”

  Angie chose a plain, unupholstered chair and sat down carefully. The upholstered things were full of stains. He discovered that he had to sit up very straight because of the knife.

  “I hate them,” Ric repeated.

  “Me too,” Angie said, meaning that he hated his mother, but not his father.

  “If it wasn’t for the Little Brothers …” Ric left the sentence unfinished.

  Angie thought he understood something then: Ric needed the brotherhood. Something that had come to his mind several times during the week came up again: he wondered why the Little Brothers, who were so exclusive, wanted Ric if nobody else did. “Who did you have to put the Killing Eye on, Ric?”

  “Why?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “The shoemaker, Rocco. He beat his kids. And you want to know what happened to him? You know the shop, how it goes down the steps?”

  Angie nodded.

  “He tripped and put his head through the glass door. He lost one eye. An eye for an Eye. It was a big joke.”

  Angie couldn’t laugh, and he felt Ric must have done something to make it happen. Something real. He remembered Louis asking him on oath if he had killed Grossman. But he still didn’t know what he’d wanted to find out about Ric; he should have asked who recommended him. Some day he’d ask Tony maybe.

  “Who do you think killed Grossman, Angie?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

  Ric squatted at the edge of a sagging chair. “Take a guess.”

  It was as though Ric was trying to get him to accuse him. “Maybe the big guy who lives upstairs maybe.”

  Ric looked about to spring at him. “What do you say that for?”

  “I’m just guessing,” Angie said. “I told you I don’t know. The colored man maybe.”

  “What’d he look like, the one you saw?”

  Something had changed in Ric in just that few seconds. “What’d he look like?” Ric said again.

  This was the very point, Angie realized, at which the police had interrupted. He wanted terribly to understand. God … a breath’s length of prayer. He shrugged again and felt a shift in the knife. He folded his arms. He knew he was sitting like a statue, and in that instant he remembered something that made Ric’s story at the clubroom a lie: the black man wouldn’t have been carrying the statue out in the open. He’d have had it wrapped up or in a box, the way Angie had seen him carry whatever it was he took from the shop. Even if it had dropped and broken, the stuff inside would not have spilled on the street the way Ric had told the Brothers.

  “Black people all look alike,” Ric said, and he was coaxing, “but something, you know …”

  Angie said, straight out of his Forty-second Street experience: “He was wearing a little gold earring.”

  “That’s the guy!” Ric said. “Big, yeah?”

  Angie nodded.

  “The same one. I knew it. I might’ve told the police that day if I hadn’t got wise all of a sudden to why they didn’t stop, and am I glad now I didn’t.”

  “Why?” Angie felt his first little flex of power.

  “Like Louis said, if it’s the Mafia and you get in their way, you’re dead. It’s all right the way it is. It’s great. I mean, Grossman’s taken care of. That’s the big thing.”

  “I guess so,” Angie said.

  “I don’t dig you. He was in drugs, right? You’re the guy that proved it. I don’t mind, I mean, it was your Ordeal, and it happened.”

  Angie drew a deep breath. “I don’t think the Killing Eye had anything to do with him being killed.”

  “You better believe it, Angie.”

  “Unless somebody was watching me watching him and caught on.”

  “Okay. Isn’t that the Killing Eye? What’d you expect, a miracle or something?”

  “But if it was the Mafia, wouldn’t they be after me?”

  “You can’t be sure,” Ric said. “Could you identify the cops you saw getting paid off?”

  “I only saw one,” Angie said. “No.”

  “And lots of niggers wear earrings,” Ric went on, contradicting his own certainty because it suited him. “But once you put the Eye on Grossman—and the nigger caught you looking in—he wasn’t going to come to Grossman anymore. That put the Jew out of business. But he knew too much. So the mob sent him into retirement. That’s how the Little Brothers see it.”

  Angie wasn’t ready to believe it, not on Ric’s word now. He knew that Ric had lied, but he didn’t know why, and he didn’t know what to do with the information. “How come they’re down on me then?”

  “That’s something different,” Ric said, “but I think I got you out of the noose. I explained it was like you had to have some kind of alibi just in case. That waitress you called Alice? The Little Brothers don’t stand for her business. If she was in our territory, she might even be eligible for the Eye.”

  “Why?” Angie knew, but he said it anyway. All of a sudden, he was angry.

  “Look, I’m telling you, kid, and I don’t want none of your flack. She’s a whore, that’s why.”

  “You’re a Goddamned liar!” In that instant he was not afraid of Ric. He clenched his fists, wild with rage at the dirtiness, the meanness, Ric getting back at her because she called him Fat Boy.

  “Hey,” Ric said, a silly grin spreading over his face, “you mean it. You’re really sore at me. She must’ve give you a free ride, huh?” Ric slid his tongue around his lips. “I won’t tell. You balled her, huh?”

  Angie was mute with rage. The words raced through his mind, but stuck in his throat. He reached beneath his belt and undipped the sheath.

  Ric slipped off the chair and bounced like a huge ball. He kept jumping up and down like a fat clown with the grin painted on his face. The very windows jingled.

  Angie pulled the knife out. He hardly knew he was doing it. Ric went into the motions of a boxer, dancing around him, feinting punches, ducking, wheezing, dribbling spit. Angie made little stabs in his direction, but his feet were like stones, holding him in the one place. For the first minute, no longer, he could have killed Ric, but with that minute past, he was only defending himself. The terrible dance went on, Ric going into a wrestler’s act now, crouching, heaving his shoulders, popping out his belly, bumping things out of his way with his rump, kicking over chairs, grunting, howling. Angie put the knife away, stuck in his belt because he couldn’t get it into its sheath. He doubled his fists and held them tight against himself for protection. Ric gradually calmed down to where he stood and panted for breath, the smirk coming and going as he sucked the air in noisily.

  Angie backed to the door. He had to look to unbolt it.

  “Angie, wait up.”

  He looked round. Ric hadn’t moved.

  “I ain’t going to tell,” Ric said.

  “Tell! Tell the whole damn world.”

  “I mean about the knife.”

  Angie went out and closed the door behind him. He heard Ric’s phone ring. He hoped it was some terrible news and then hated himself for the weakness that kept him from ever getting beyond the wish, the hope.

  The first thing he did when he got home was hide the knife in one of his father’s shoes which were in his closet. He could remember his mother pitching the pair of them out of the closet in her bedroom all the way into the living room. His father had forgotten them, or else he never meant to use them again, the ties that went up above his ankles. He hated them. “Like in the old country,” he kept saying. But he had said it in Italian.

  It was one of the things his mother and Angie never talked about, him keeping that pair of his father’s shoes. And when she cleaned his closet, she never touched them. Angie could see the dust on and under them where she’d wiped around them. Sometimes he cleaned it away himself with a
pair of socks he was going to put in the laundry. He pushed the knife down deep in the shoe so that it would not show, and flapped the tongue over the hilt.

  He went into the bathroom. He could smell himself, the way he had been sweating all day. He drew a slow bath of tepid water and sank into it. He didn’t know how he felt except tired and depressed. He had just left the bathroom when the phone rang. He was sure it was Ric, and if it was, Ric knew that he was home. He’d keep on calling.

  “Angelo Palermo?” It was not Ric’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Sergeant Darcy at the Precinct house. Lieutenant Marks wants to see you here at ten:fifteen tomorrow morning.”

  15

  THE SMELL OF THE East River was pungent as Marks started up the FDR Drive, a low-tide smell that he liked, something just short of rotten. There had to be a reason for the blotter discrepancies … Did the clannishness of the neighborhood extend into the precinct police? He thought of Tomasino, his hesitancy to criticize the boys. Was that hesitancy compounded in the case of this Mrs. Niccoli? Might she have been afraid to substantiate her complaint against one of the Little Brothers? He thought again of Angie and his fear in that bleak clubroom. And on the roof: Marks could not believe the theft of the coat sufficient to generate that kind of fear.