“Jimmy,” Fiore said, “get me a car.”
“We can take mine,” Jimmy offered.
“Just get me a car,” Fiore said, “and get yourself some sleep.”
Which was a good idea. They had been up all night and Jimmy Angelisi looked like a lump of cooked pasta.
6
They didn’t get out of the restaurant until three. As they drove up Madison Avenue, Jeffrey announced that they were just going upstairs to change their clothes before making the one-hour drive to their country house in Bedford Hills.
“We’re what?” Jessica asked in a voice that was almost a groan.
The prospect filled Phyllis with dread. The storm seemed to be winding down, but the roads would still be slick. Besides, she couldn’t remember ever having felt this tired in her life. From beginning to end, the day had been blindingly exhausting. Even without the hideous way it all ended, she would have felt utterly depleted after so much preparation. Now she felt drained to the point of numbness. It was a brutal comedown for a woman who, toward midnight, could already imagine herself kicking off her shoes and stretching out on the bed in the most perfect dress she had ever owned, accepting the congratulations of her husband and the gratitude of her daughter. Highlights of the party would unspool in her mind like old family movies.
Instead, there was this.
“Why can’t we go when we get up?” Jessica whined.
“Fine, then you talk to the New York Times when they call,” Jeffrey said.
Phyllis glanced over to her daughter. She was a sensible girl with a surprisingly high reality quotient for a child of her age and upbringing, but she obviously hadn’t let this particular reality sink in. What in heavens name did she imagine? That this was all going to go away like a bad date?
“I won’t answer the phone, all right?” Jessica said.
Jeffrey didn’t answer her because he didn’t have to. He certainly wasn’t going to let his daughter make any more decisions at this particular point in time. Eddie Vincenzo and his three friends said all that needed saying about her judgment.
Martin waited downstairs with the motor running while the three Blaines went upstairs to change into appropriate clothes. He was the fifth driver Jeffrey and Phyllis had hired in the last year. One was fired because the car reeked of alcohol and another because it reeked of marijuana. The other two quit because Phyllis ran them around like gerbils in a wheel, a thousand errands every day. The problem was that they talked to other drivers, who spent most of their time parked outside office buildings and restaurants with their hats low over their eyes. These comparisons inevitably led to the conviction that the best driving jobs involved the least amount of driving. And no errands. “I am driver,” the Russian had announced when he gave notice. “If missus want, I take her to bakery.” What he meant but didn’t say was that it compromised the dignity of his calling to go into the bakery himself to pick up boxes of cakes and rolls, to go into Dean & Deluca’s for grapefruits and pasta and salad greens, to deliver invitations door-to-door like a vacuum cleaner salesman.
Martin was a sullen kid, almost autistic in his silences. He had shrugged when Jeffrey asked him if he would mind doing errands and shrugged again when Jeffrey told him about the hours. His full name was Martin Luther King Junior Wilson, and he had written all of it, in tiny block letters, on his application. If the forty-five-mile drive from Manhattan to Bedford Hills in the predawn hours struck him as an excessive demand on his services, especially at the end of a day which began, almost twenty hours ago, with him ferrying the female Blaines around the city from florist to dress shop to hair salon, he gave no indication of it. He would be driving back to the city after he left them at the house. They used the Land Rover in the country. The big Jag always went back.
No one said a word on the drive up, which took well over an hour because of the lingering effects of the storm. The highway was reasonably well cleared but the local streets were a mess, and the long driveway to the house was covered with half a foot of crusty snow despite the best efforts of the row of white pines that stood shoulder to shoulder along both sides of the winding drive, canopying it all the way from the road practically to the front door of the house.
Jessica and Phyllis went straight to bed. Jeffrey watched Martin back the car down the drive in the ruts he had made driving in. The sound of the engine and the tires on the snow was absorbed into the landscape even before the car was out of sight. There is no silence like the silence after a snowstorm. In just a light windbreaker, Jeffrey waited on the front deck, watching and listening to the stillness. The sun wasn’t up yet but he thought he could see a faint lightening of the sky to the east.
He didn’t even consider going to bed. There was too much to think about. He had put everything on hold until he could get his wife and daughter out of the city and up here. Even on the drive up, he had kept his thoughts at bay. Now he had the world to himself and found, as he half expected he would, that he couldn’t get that man out of his mind. Fiore he had said, hadn’t he? Fiore. It was Italian for flower. Phyllis said he was a gangster and that certainly made more sense than Jeffrey’s original supposition that he was a cop. Not that having a gangster walk in and take charge made any sense either. But that is exactly what the man had done. He had walked into the chaos as though he breathed chaos and lived for it. He assumed command with a sureness that took Jeffrey’s breath away. The man instantly saw the ramifications of everything, tightened the screws, turned things the way Jeffrey wanted them turned, like a bottle genie in an expensive suit. Jeffrey had always been good at solving problems. Everyone he knew in the banking world was good at it. But this man didn’t just solve them, he made them go away. The four boys vanished as though they had never existed. Amy Laidlaw whimpered when she saw her father, but she went with him. Laidlaw himself, who had stormed in like an avenging angel, clearing space before him with the sheer violence of his wrath, conferred quietly and privately with this stranger and then took his daughter home.
Why? That was the question. Why would a man like this Fiore, a gangster, if that’s what he was, insert himself into the middle of a situation that had nothing to do with him?
Jeffrey knew, with that odd and awkward certainty that comes at random moments in one’s life, that the answer to this question would be forthcoming soon. A few times in one’s life, on unchosen occasions, a door will open and someone unexpected will step in, and one realizes with irrefutable clarity that what just happened was not in fact unexpected. In just this way, Jeffrey knew that Chet Fiore himself would bring the answers to all the questions he raised.
The cold air filled his chest. He could feel it expanding inside him; it seemed to sharpen all his mental processes. He watched as the sun, an unmistakable glow now just over the horizon, burned its way through the remnants of last night’s storm. The willow at the bend of the brook bent with its burden of snow practically to the rippling surface of the water. Backlit, a dozen fine-lined birches in a stand where Phyllis had had the pines all cleared, looked black against a sky as pale and bright as water. As he walked around the corner of the house, his appearance startled a small flock of mourning doves and they scattered with a sudden whir of wings. Crows were massing on the trees beyond the lawn. A cardinal shrilled its two-note call over and over from the bare filaments of the forsythia.
The sound of a car crunching through the snow on the drive came as a kind of confirmation of everything he had been thinking and he smiled to himself. This was, after all, what he had been waiting for without quite knowing until now that he was waiting.
A Mercedes was easing down the drive toward the house.
Jeffrey waited.
The Mercedes followed the tracks Martin had made, slipping like an unsure skater. Chet Fiore cut the engine and got out of the driver’s side. “I think we’re going to be all right,” he said.
Fiore looked around the kitchen as though he were appraising it. “Where’s the coffee stuff?” he asked.
&n
bsp; Jeffrey had no idea. Phyllis always took the coffeemaker out when she wanted to use it and then put it away. He never watched to see where it went.
“There’s a little place in town, it’s not bad,” he said. “Maybe we should go there.”
“I didn’t come for brunch, Mr. Blaine,” Fiore said. He started opening cabinet doors and didn’t stop until he found an espresso machine, a coffee grinder, and glass jars of carefully labeled beans. “What do you like?” he asked.
Jeffrey walked away without answering, a toss of his shoulders indicating that anything would do. He crossed the kitchen to look out the back window.
Four deer were browsing on the bare branches of a stand of larch just beyond the lawn. They looked up, wary, as he came into their view in the window, their tails erect, their ears twitching to locate a sound that would tell them to run. They heard none, and Jeffrey remained motionless in the window. One by one they turned their heads and went back to their breakfasts. They were all males, young ones, judging by their frail and unassertive antlers. Grown males rarely travel together but at this age they have no need for the solitude that will be their lot for the rest of their lives.
In less than five minutes Fiore was standing by Jeffrey’s side. “Espresso,” he said, holding out a cup. “You don’t do the whole steamed milk bit, do you?” he asked.
Jeffrey looked at the small cups of thick black coffee. He heard himself laugh and he said, “You make coffee, too. Is there anything you don’t do?”
“No,” Fiore said. “There isn’t. This is a pretty place.”
“We like it.”
Fiore turned away, as though the banality of the response annoyed him. “We’ve got a lot to talk about,” he said.
The living room was the showpiece of the house. The high, slanted ceiling rose to a height of almost thirty-five feet at the center. Skylights cut in among the roof timbers gave the red cedar paneling of the room a warm, woody glow like firelight in the early morning. Staircases at both ends of the long interior wall led to a balcony that gave access to the upstairs bedrooms. Jessica slept upstairs. The master bedroom was on the ground floor because Phyllis wanted a bedroom that opened right to the deck and the yard beyond.
Jeffrey motioned his guest to the six-foot black leather sofa that shaped one of the two seating areas into which the wide room was divided. If Fiore registered the grandeur of the room at all, it didn’t show in his face. He hadn’t touched his coffee before but now he drained it in a gulp. “Who’s here?” he asked.
“Here?”
“In the house. Who’s in the house?” he said in a tone of dogged repetition, as though his simple question should have been answered already.
“My wife and my daughter,” Jeffrey said.
“No servants?”
“No,” Jeffrey said. “No servants.”
Fiore nodded his acknowledgment. The preliminaries were over, the gesture seemed to say. Now it was safe to proceed. “I think the biggest part of your problem has been solved,” he said.
“My problem?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Blaine. You gave a party for liquored-up minors, one of whom was raped, two of whom were sucking and fucking like seasoned pros.”
“The staff was under clear orders,” Jeffrey started to protest, but Fiore cut him short.
“I’m not talking about the staff. I’m talking about you. Did you call the police?”
“I thought you were the police. And then you said—”
Again Fiore cut him off.
“You know you’ve got to call the police on a thing like that.”
“Right.”
“And you called them?”
Jeffrey didn’t answer. He looked at his coffee cup and then set it down, his mind sifting through the intricacies of this thing. He tried to find something he could grab hold of and he said, speaking slowly and carefully, the way he spoke at staff meetings, “I don’t believe there’s a crime here, Mr. Fiore. It was the girl’s father who decided not to press charges.”
“You’ve got a lawyer, don’t you, Mr. Blaine?” Fiore asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“And you trust him?”
“He wouldn’t be my lawyer if I didn’t trust him.”
“Good. Then call him up. Tell him there was a rape. Ask him if there’s a crime even if the girl’s father doesn’t want there to be. Ask him if you’ve got a problem.”
This was a phone call Jeffrey didn’t need to make. He knew the answer perfectly well. He had a problem. He had a lot of problems. “What are you proposing?” he asked.
“I’m not proposing anything,” Fiore said. “I just came here to help you out. If you want to be helped out. Take a minute, think it over if you need to.”
Fiore got to his feet and wandered to the wall under the balcony, which was lined with well-stocked bookshelves. There weren’t a lot of doodads on the shelves, just books. His finger moved along the spines, taking in the titles, leaving Jeffrey to mull his options.
In fact, Jeffrey wasn’t thinking at all, at least not in the way he always and invariably dealt with all the problems, business and personal, that came his way. He felt like a man who had been punched well below the belt. He recognized the feeling as cold, sweaty panic. He heard Fiore’s voice but didn’t catch the words. “Excuse me,” he said, forcing his attention across the room.
Fiore turned to face him. “I asked you if you read all these books.”
“Most of them I suppose, yes,” Jeffrey said, his voice betraying his irritation at the irrelevance.
“It’s all history, stuff like that,” Fiore commented.
“History and biography mostly, yes. Why are we talking about books?”
“I’m just wondering,” Fiore said, “if you learned anything reading all this history and biography.”
“Are you making some kind of point?”
“You bet I am, Mr. Blaine,” Fiore said, walking straight toward Jeffrey, who was on his feet now. “You don’t get books written about you unless you’re doing something worth doing. That means taking chances and that means sooner or later you get your nuts caught in a wringer. I’ll give you killer odds right now, Mr. Blaine, that there isn’t one of those people in one of those books that didn’t pull his nuts out of that wringer when he got them caught. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
Jeffrey came right back at him, rising to a kind of indignation that just a moment ago he hadn’t known he felt. “What exactly is your connection to all this?” he demanded.
“I told you. I’m trying to help you out.”
“You cruise the city looking for good deeds to do?”
Fiore smiled. “Not quite. Stasny called. He said there was a problem.”
“Why did he call you?”
“I own the place.”
This was a possibility Jeffrey hadn’t even considered. What did it change? His mind jumped through the permutations. “All right, Mr. Fiore,” he said, “let’s look at this the other way around. It’s your restaurant and therefore your employees who gave those girls that liquor. It was you who sent the boys home and you’re the one who talked to Amy Laidlaw’s father. You’re also the one who talked me out of calling the police. So it seems to me that you and I have the same kind of problem. If that’s true, why don’t you tell me what you’re planning to do about it.”
Fiore laughed. It wasn’t a mocking laugh in the least. It was deep and rolling, the laughter of a man who gave every appearance of being genuinely amused.
“In the first place, Mr. Blaine,” he said, and then seemed to change direction in mid-thought. “You know,” he interrupted himself to say, “I ought to call you Jeffrey. That’s all right, isn’t it? Unless you prefer Jeff?”
“No, no,” Jeffrey said.
“Jeffrey it is,” Fiore said. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here. In the first place, Jeffrey, there are very few people, very, very few who know I own that restaurant. Even fewer, none in fact, who can prove it. S
o that takes care of your first point. What was your next one? Well, they’re all kind of the same. I sent the kids home, I talked to the father, I talked to you. But the funny thing is, Mr. Blaine—I’m sorry, Jeffrey— the funny thing is that I don’t think there’s anyone who remembers seeing me in that restaurant last night. Laidlaw sure as hell doesn’t remember. Call him up. Ask him. He doesn’t even remember going there himself. Because he had no reason to be there if his daughter wasn’t raped, which we’re all more or less agreed that she wasn’t.”
“All right,” Jeffrey conceded, “we’re all more or less agreed.”
“That’s you, me, Mr. Laidlaw, young Miss Laidlaw, those other two girls—”
“The boys of course.”
“What boys?” Fiore asked with a sly smile.
Jeffrey returned the smile. “Admirable,” he said.
“Fucking A. Admirable,” Fiore agreed. “But I’d wipe that smile off my face if I were you because you’re forgetting about Mr. Noel Garver of the New York Post. He swears he saw that Jewish chick with a young man’s dong halfway down her gullet. He swears he heard Amy Laidlaw screaming and swears he saw her laid out on the floor in a pile next to her own underwear.”
Jeffrey hadn’t forgotten about Garver but he had permitted himself, over the last minute or two, to ease the reporter out of the equation while Fiore was going through his proof, showing how neatly it all might work out. Now the mention of Garver’s name brought the dangerous little man back to the forefront of Jeffrey’s consciousness.
“And he’ll print it,” Jeffrey said. Even to his own ears his voice sounded hollow.
If the story came out there would be an investigation. Jeffrey could deny it, of course, but lying to the police was a felony. The well-being of his family would be hostage to the first person at the party who broke ranks and told the truth. On the other hand, he could come clean the moment he was questioned about it. Except that doing so would leave him unable to explain his conduct on the night of the party, which amounted to nothing less than a conspiracy to conceal a major felony.
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