by James Lepore
On the wall next to the kitchen alcove was a telephone, which emitted no dial tone when Chris picked it up. Next to the phone was a small cork bulletin board with two photographs pinned to it. One of them was of an attractive young blonde woman, presumably Allison, and a heavy set, swarthy man in his forties. They were standing in front of a palm tree in bright sunlight holding tropical drinks – the kind with parasols sticking out of them – smiling at the camera. They were in bathing suits and the man had his arm around the woman’s waist, his hand resting possessively on her hip. The other was of Allison and a dark-haired, pretty woman of the same age, both in bikinis, apparently taken at the same vacation spot.
As Chris was looking at these pictures, Michele’s cell phone rang, and she stepped into the hall to have her conversation. Chris unpinned both photographs, and turned them over. On the back of the one of the two women was written, in bright red ink, “Allie, What a great trip!!! I have lots more pictures. Call me when you get back. Heather XXXOOO.” Chris put both pictures in his shirt pocket, then sat on the sofa to go through Allison’s mail, which Michele had piled neatly between two faded corduroy cushions. It was a hundred percent bills and junk mail. Looking around, he saw that the only drawers in the apartment were in the kitchen alcove. These he went through but found nothing of any moment. The bookcase did not contain books but rather neat rows of photocopied screenplays with blue and red covers, the kind you can buy on the street in Soho and the East Village for ten dollars. He pulled one out at random and saw that it was Robert Towne’s Chinatown, heavily dog-eared and highlighted in the portions where Evelyn Mulray appears, played by Faye Dunaway in the movie, with scribbled notes covering the margins so densely that, at first, it looked like intricate art work.
He replaced the script and turned to see Michele standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with her right shoulder and hip.
“I told you there was nothing here,” she said.
“Where did she keep her clothes?”
“In cardboard boxes on the floor, but she took all her clothes with her.”
“Who are these people?” Chris asked, taking the pictures out of his pocket and walking over to hand them to her.
Michele took them and glanced quickly at them before replying: “This is Allison with a producer she was seeing. I never got his name. The girl is a friend from L.A.”
“Heather.”
“Right.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Johnson, Jansen, I’m not sure.”
“Do you know where she lives?”
“No, just L.A.”
“When did Allison move in here?”
“In the winter, January, February.”
“Why did she leave these pictures behind?”
“She didn’t. I found them in the sofa cushions when I started putting the mail there. She had a dozen like them up there, which she took. So I just stuck these back.”
Chris reached out and took the photographs back. He looked at both images, then said, “When did she take this trip?”
“A few weeks after she moved in. It was snowing like a bitch here.”
“Where is this place?”
“In Mexico. A place called Palmilla. Allison said it was beautiful.”
“Where did she go the second time?”
“The second time?”
“Heather says, ‘call me when you get back.’”
“Oh, right. She went with this guy again. I think to Florida for a week.”
“Was she doing heroin?”
Michele did not answer. She looked at Chris and held his gaze for the first time since they’d met. Behind her eyes, he saw, very briefly, another Michele, lost and almost forgotten, the one whose life heroin was trying to destroy. “You’d know,” he said.
“She thought it was cool at first.”
It was Chris’ turn to be silent.
“I didn’t turn her on, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Who did?”
“Her producer boyfriend. He even gave her some to give to me. It was great smack, not like the shit on the street. Where do you think she is?”
“She’s probably getting high with him right now. I don’t think she’s making a movie. If you see her, will you tell her to call me?”
Chris handed her one of the last of his DeVoss & Kline cards, with their number crossed out and his apartment number written in.
“So you’re a lawyer,” Michele said looking up after reading the card.
“I used to be.”
“I’ll bet you were a good one. Did you do any custody cases?”
“Child custody?”
“Yes.”
“No. Nothing like that. Why?”
“No reason.”
“Get off the street, Michele, get clean. Go to Legal Aid. They’ll help you to see your kids.”
“My kids are dead.”
And soon you will be, too, Chris thought. Then he turned and left.
12.
“Tell me about Labrutto?” Chris asked Nick Scarpa.
“He’s a bad guy,” Scarpa answered. “There’s a couple of things I have to do for him, then I’m quitting.”
“Is that why you’re willing to take me to his house unannounced?”
“That and for your old man.”
“What do you mean by bad guy? The porn movies?”
“The porn movies, the drugs. He’s got a sidekick that gives me the creeps. He keeps girls like slaves.”
“You mean in chains, locked up?”
“No, but the kid he’s got there now is doped up all the time. She’s his current porn star. I feel sorry for her. I’d like to get her out of there if I can.”
“How long have you been working for him.”
“Since I got out of the can, six months.”
Chris gazed out the passenger window. They were in Nick Scarpa’s Pontiac, Nick driving, his crooked fingers gripping the steering wheel at ten and two, crossing the Hudson River on the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge. The day was for the moment warm and sunny, the sky a dome of blue, the thunder clouds massing up river at the northern horizon only a distant threat.
“How long were you in.”
“In the last twenty-seven years, twenty-three.”
“For what?”
“Armed robbery. Two of them.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifty-two.”
“Are you done now?”
“Yeah, I’m rehabilitated.”
Nick Scarpa smiled when he said this, and, as he did, his face was transformed. A happy twinkle replaced the slightly confused look in his eyes, and his broad grin, revealing a full set of white but crooked teeth, softened the fierceness of his mashed nose and blurred the scar that ran along his jaw line from ear to chin. For a second, Chris could see the handsome teenager who lived in the tenement next to his on Carmine Street in the sixties, who occasionally walked over to the playground of Our Lady of Pompeii school to shoot baskets with him and his friends.
“Armed robbery’s a young man’s game, Nick.”
“I’m done,” Scarpa said. “The next time I go up, it’s for good. I got two grandkids I can’t do that to.”
“I appreciate what you’re doing.”
“It’s no big deal. Like I said, I’m quitting anyway.”
“Have you been to Barsonetti’s house other than the one time?”
“No. I think the albino usually makes those runs. He was sick or something the day I went.”
“Who’s the albino?”
“The sidekick. He lives in a cottage on the property.”
Nick had not asked Chris what his interest was in Jimmy Barsonetti, nor why exactly he wanted to talk to Labrutto. He had simply agreed to bring him along the next time he went to Labrutto’s house in Alpine, a small, mansion-dotted town situated on the cliffs on the Jersey side of the Hudson. That day turned out to be the day after his Sunday visit to Allison McRae’s apartment
on Suffolk Street.
“Did you box in prison?”
“A little in the beginning. To let people know I could take care of myself.”
Nick, Chris knew, had won the Golden Gloves middleweight title at age seventeen. A wild man in the ring, when he turned pro two years later, he was already being compared to LaMotta and Basilio. Even now, Chris knew, glancing at Nick’s big-knuckled hands as they clenched the steering wheel, a blow from the ex-fighter-ex-con would do a lot of damage. A few, delivered in sequence and with the bitterness of a wasted life behind them, could easily be fatal.
“Have you killed anyone?” Chris asked.
“Sure, two people.”
“Who were they?”
“One was a Puerto Rican who came at me with a knife one night in the Bronx. I shot him in the heart. The other was a black guy who tried to rape me in Chino. I cracked his head against a sink. His two buddies had shivs. I got stabbed a few times, but they both ended up in the prison hospital.”
“What about Joe Black?” Chris asked.
“Joe Black?”
“Yes. Who did he kill?”
“People who deserved to be killed, mostly.”
“Like who?’
“Bad guys from other families, guys who tried to put the Boot out of business. He killed a guy once who raped two women over by the old West Street, by the docks.”
“Who told him to do that?”
“No one, he just did it.”
“How do you know this?”
“I talked to one of the guys he was with.”
“Jesus.”
“Joe Black was the toughest guy in the five boroughs,” Nick said, “but that wasn’t all there was to him. When your brother first came up to me, I thought it was thirty years ago, and I was looking at your old man.”
The Joe Black Chris remembered was old, his face a grim, expressionless mask, his once jet black hair turning grayer with each passing year. But there was another Joe Black: the young man in the photographs culled recently from the house in Bloomfield, standing in the sun next to his new car on Carmine Street, toweling himself off after emerging from the sea at Coney Island, holding his son Chris by the hand on the day of his First Communion. That Joe Black looked remarkably like Joseph, even to the hint of the I’ve-got-a-secret smile that Joseph seemed to have patented in his teens. The picture on the beach Chris had had to look twice at to make sure it was Joe Black and not Joseph.
“He was a good guy, Joe Black,” said Nick.
“He was?”
“When I did my first stickup, he hunted me down. I was holed up in a basement apartment in Brooklyn, out in Green Point. Joe Black comes in through the window one night. He’s got that look in his eyes. Very quiet, very scary, that was your old man. He wants me to turn myself in, do my time, come out to fight again. I was entitled to one free crime, he said, but no more. Antoinette was pregnant at the time. She was eighteen – she lost the kid – what kind of a man was I? he said. I bluffed him, then I ran. Of course, I was caught, but I thought I was a tough guy. I was nineteen. And here I am today.”
“How did you know him?”
“Your father?”
“Yes.”
“Back then, Carmine Street was more Italian than Little Italy. Everybody knew each other. Joe Black came to all my fights.”
“How old was he?”
“Twenty-nine, thirty.”
“What brought that on?”
“What?”
“That first stickup. You won the Golden Gloves. Everyone said you had a career.”
It was Nick’s turn to look out the window. They were heading north on the Palisades Interstate Parkway, a low volume, scenic road that runs along the edge of the famous cliffs that for twenty miles drop straight down in vertical columns to meet the Hudson River five hundred feet below.
“I threw my last fight. Did you know that?”
“No. I was just a kid, then you went away.”
“The Boot, did you ever meet him?”
“A couple of times. He was at my wedding.”
“He told me I’d never fight again. He mentioned how pretty my sister was. I took a dive. A week later, I pulled my first job. Six months later, I was in Attica, doing three-to-five.”
“Joe Black worked for the Boot.”
“That’s common knowledge. Are you saying I should be holding a grudge?”
“Why not? It was because he had muscle like Joe Black that Velardo was so feared. He might have sent him to cut your sister if you didn’t throw that fight.”
“Life is hard, Chris. I thought you figured that out by now.”
They had turned off the highway onto a leafy street that ascended into the hills, thick with tall and ancient evergreens, that gave Alpine its name. Glimpses of stone turrets, glass solariums, gated entries, long winding driveways and beautiful lawns and gardens were to be seen as they glided along, with an occasional full-blown mansion appearing and slipping quickly by, like the mirage of a giant ship at sea. At number 516 they were stopped by a thick wrought iron gate, ten feet high by twenty feet across, anchored by stone pillars topped with what looked to Chris like security cameras. Through the gate they saw, about a hundred feet away, a man walking toward them along the gravel driveway, moving in and out of the shafts of morning sunlight finding their way through the overhanging branches of the tall trees that lined the drive.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Nick. “Madison Square Garden has those Friday night fights. We’ll go Friday. We’ll have dinner. I’ll tell you what I know about your father. He wrote me when I was in Attica, my first bid. I still have the letters. I’ll bring them.”
Chris shook his head. It was unbelievable to him that Joe Black Massi had ever written a letter. The image of his father taking up pen and paper, with the thoughtfulness that that act implies, stopped Chris cold. For years, Chris had clung to the belief that his father was not quite human, not entirely like everyone else, who lived and breathed and made mistakes and felt all sorts of things, like anger, jealousy, hate, sadness, annoyance, all the things that human beings felt all the time. Did such a man write letters to a nineteen-year-old in prison? Did such a man avenge the rape of women who were strangers to him? Did such a man try to point out the road to redemption to a hard-headed young fighter turned armed robber?
Chris had built a wall around his heart after his car accident and the killing of Ed Dolan Sr., a wall that he would not let Joe Black breach while he was alive. Now that Joe was dead, here comes cockeyed Nick Scarpa trying to vaporize it with a word or two. There was nothing new age about Chris Massi. He did not believe that the dead communicated with the living. But he did believe that certain things were meant to be. He had never thought to look for sources of information concerning the reclusive and solitary Joe Black Massi. Why would he want to learn things that would cause him pain? But here the universe had handed him a primary source who had good things to say. Considering that he was about to follow in his father’s footsteps, it would certainly be worth hearing that those footsteps led occasionally down paths of righteousness and honor, qualities that at the moment Chris sorely needed to associate with the Massi name.
13.
Before Chris could answer, his attention was drawn to the man in the driveway, who had reached the gate and was swinging it open. He could be seen clearly now: tall and thin, in his late twenties, platinum blonde hair swept back from his forehead and kept in place with some kind of gel, his complexion milky white – if he wasn’t albino, he was the closest thing to it – his eyes hidden by very dark sunglasses, his black slacks and black pullover shirt making him look even thinner than he probably really was: an eerie stick figure gesturing them to drive onto the property, which Nick did, and to stop, which Nick also did, once he was inside the gate.
“Who’s this?” the man said to Nick, nodding toward Chris as he leaned into the driver’s side window. “A friend of mine,” Nick answered.
“Does Guy know he’s with you?
”
“No, but it’ll be okay.”
“Who is he?”
“Chris Massi. He used to be Junior Boy’s son-in-law.”
The albino stepped around to the back of the car and pulled his cell phone from the clip on his belt. As he dialed, he swung the heavy gate shut. Chris and Nick watched through the chrome-trimmed mirrors on the sides of the old Pontiac as he talked on the phone.
“I met Labrutto when I got out of Chino in 1987,” Nick said. “At the time, he was living in a rented bungalow in West L.A.”
“Was he doing porn then?”
“He was just starting.”
“Does Junior Boy know about his connection to Barsonetti?”
“I doubt it.”
“What’s that all about?”
“I think it’s something pretty nasty.”
“You mean nastier than the usual nasty?”
“Yes.”
“Like what?”
“The girl has said some wild things.”
“The one who’s stoned all the time?”
“Yeah, Stacey. You’ll probably meet her.”
Chris was about to ask another question when the albino reappeared at Nick’s window.
“Go ahead,” he said. “You know where to park.”
As the car rounded a curve in the driveway, they passed a small caretaker’s cottage with a black BMW sedan parked next to it. A quarter mile farther on, they came to the house, a low-slung, modernistic affair set on a small rise, with a gravel circular driveway in front, in the center of which was a metal sculpture, about ten feet high, painted red, that looked like a bird with a broken neck. At the front door, Guy Labrutto himself greeted them, and Chris immediately recognized him as the fat, swarthy man in the photograph he had taken from Allison McRae’s apartment the day before. He was wearing a freshly manicured goatee, and he was now dressed all in black, but it was clearly the same man in tropical wear with his hand on Allison’s hip on the beach in Mexico.