Sue Tunney fell in the later category. She had no use for them, and so they made sure to have no use for her.
And yet here she was, dressed like an art student, calling out to Phyllis as though they were the best of friends, as though they had arranged to meet here for tea.
“Oh, hi,” Phyllis said, offering a plastic smile. “I’m late for a meeting. I’ve really got to run.”
Sue fell in step beside her. “I’ll walk with you. I was just wondering how Jessica was doing.”
“Thriving,” Phyllis said.
“How can you tell?” Sue laughed. “They don’t even talk to us.” And then, realizing she had been presumptuous, she added, “Unless yours does.”
“Not really,” Phyllis conceded, in a tone that suggested she was agreeing out of generosity but in fact had an excellent relationship with her daughter if the truth were known.
She had reached a bank of elevators in a somewhat hidden recess. Sue, who spent a great deal of time at the museum, had never realized there were elevators. “Grace tells me Jessica’s still seeing that boy,” she said. “I was surprised.”
The elevator door opening behind Phyllis might as well have been a chasm opening in the earth. She felt as though she might fall in. She managed a wan smile but felt a twitch at the corners of her mouth. “She hasn’t mentioned any boys,” Phyllis said. “What boy would that be?”
Sue paused for effect, smiling unpleasantly, as though she were enjoying this. “From the birthday party,” she said. “I’m sure you know the one.”
Phyllis stepped back into the waiting elevator. She sensed the doors closing on her from both sides. “She sees whom she wants,” she said, trying to make it all sound fine. “She’s never given us cause to meddle.”
Hot tea spilled over onto her hand as the elevator started to rise. She passed the cup to her other hand and shook the pain away. It wasn’t clear which one she hated most at that moment, smug Sue Tunney, who certainly seemed to get a kick out of breaking this little piece of news. Or Jessica. Who had all the morals and good sense of a cat in heat. Just like her father, Phyllis thought. She thinks with her crotch.
Jeffrey had no trouble reading the shock on his daughter’s face when she opened the door to her room and saw him standing in the corridor. She was wearing panties and a loose shirt that hung halfway down her thighs. She flashed a smile and said, “Hi, Daddy,” with a show of enthusiasm.
He heard someone moving in the room behind her. “Who’s there?” he asked.
He saw the dark flicker of annoyance in Jessica’s eyes. “Barbara, wait a second. My father wants to check you out,” she called out without turning back. And then, as she stepped back from the door, she said, “She’s not dressed, Daddy,” in a tone one might take with a child.
Barbara was standing no more than eight feet away on the far side of the tiny room. She was wearing tights but the spandex top of her exercise suit was in her hand. She brought both hands up to her breasts to cover them.
“Hi, Mr. Blaine, it’s good to see you,” she said.
She stepped toward him, and before he even realized what she was doing, she offered him her hand, uncovering herself with careless and insolent bravado. She stood like that a moment, one small but perfect breast pointed straight at him, the other covered by the dangling fabric she held in her left hand.
“Daddy was afraid I might be with a boy,” Jessica said. “Satisfied?”
“Put something on,” Jeffrey said sharply.
The girl smiled knowingly and turned away to pull her shirt over her head. He could smell the sweetness of her sweat.
“You, too,” he said to Jessica.
He let her choose the location for their talk. All he wanted, he said, was somewhere they could get a sandwich and wouldn’t run into too many of her friends. Half an hour later they were sitting opposite each other in a corner booth at a dirty sandwich shop that did mostly takeout business.
“I assume you know what this is about,” he said.
“You drove all the way up here to tell me,” she said. “Why don’t you just do that?”
She opened her sandwich and busied herself picking off the pieces of lettuce that had too much dressing.
“I can’t believe you’re seeing that boy again,” he began. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what happened at your birthday party.”
“Eddie had nothing to do with that,” she protested sullenly, without raising her eyes.
“Yes. He did,” Jeffrey said with toneless emphasis, a simple declaration of fact.
Her eyes came up to meet his, bright and defiant. “He was with me,” she said, countering fact with fact. “He didn’t even go upstairs at all.”
Her father probably thought all the girls were virgins and all the boys were like Georgie Vallo.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “What do you remember about that night? Starting with the moment you heard Amy scream.”
She wished he hadn’t mentioned Amy and so she made an effort to recall the night only in an abstract way, just as words, without playing it back in her memory.
“Everybody ran upstairs,” she said. “And then her father came. We went home. And then we went up to the country.”
“Do you remember a man who showed up? He talked to Amy and he talked to Amy’s father?”
She remembered him. Dark-eyed and handsome. “Yeah, who was that?” she said. “He took over like he owned the place.”
“He does,” Jeffrey said. “Now listen to me and don’t say anything. You’re not going to like what I tell you. But you know I wouldn’t lie to you.”
Everything inside her felt as though it had just tied itself into one suffocating knot, and for a moment she was actually afraid she was going to be sick right there at the table. She bit her lips together and held her breath and waited. She had no idea what he was going to tell her, but she felt as though she already knew every word, as though the two of them had played exactly this scene before. Even though she couldn’t remember how it turned out, she knew it turned out badly.
“Jessica,” he said, speaking slowly and carefully, “everything that happened that night happened on purpose. The man’s name is Chet Fiore. He’s a gangster. There was something he wanted me to do. So the girls were attacked and it was covered up and I let myself become part of the cover-up. That’s a felony, and that was the hold he would have on me, to get me to do what he wanted. That boy took you away this summer for the same reason. He works for Chet Fiore.”
Tears streamed down her face and her shoulders heaved with violent, convulsive sobs. She shook her head vehemently and tried to speak, just “No, no, no,” but no sound came out. She knew her father was telling the truth as fact after fact jumped into her mind like the sequence of images in an out-of-control nightmare. She suddenly remembered that Mr. Stasny knew Eddie. You are enjoying, Ms. Blaine? And you, Edward? the little man asked, looking straight at Eddie. Edward. He called him Edward. And then there was the fact that the boys somehow knew that there were rooms upstairs. And the fact that the rooms just happened to be open. And the phone call Eddie made from the hotel room in New Orleans, and others like it in Las Vegas and all along the way. And even the money, for that matter. Eddie had money for everything.
Her ears were roaring like a waterfall and she didn’t even know if her father was still talking. She lurched from the table and ran blindly for the door. Jeffrey followed slowly, giving her a little time.
He found her by the car, her face buried in her arms, which rested on the roof. It was possible that she was crying so bitterly because she loved Eddie Vincenzo, but he doubted that she did in any serious way. Being used like that would hurt just the same whether she loved him or not, and there was nothing he could do about her pain except offer a little comfort. He came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder.
She whirled to face him, her tear-red eyes gleaming with rage. “Don’t you touch me,” she screamed, “don’t you dare touch me.”
She hesitated only a fraction of a second. “You want to know something, Daddy?” she hissed, hating him at that moment with all the passion in her body. “I went down on Eddie Vincenzo. You want to know something else? I fucked Eddie Vincenzo all over the country. I did coke with Eddie Vincenzo. You knew what he was, you knew why he wanted me, why he was using me, and you didn’t say a goddamned thing. What gives you the right to try to save me now?”
The truth of her accusation stung more sharply than the bitterness.
“You’re still seeing him?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But not because I stopped. I give myself away cheap. Don’t you know that?”
“Don’t do this, Jessica. Don’t talk about yourself like that.”
“He stopped coming to see me. He stopped calling. I thought, fuck you, I’m better off rid of him. But y’know what, Daddy? I think if he calls I’ll meet him somewhere. Maybe we can get it started again. And he will call. Y’know why, Daddy? Because your little girl gives great head.”
He felt his body tense and he knew a feeling he had never known before. He wanted to hit her, to slap her across the face and then see the wide-eyed hurt in her face. He had never hit anyone in his life, certainly not his child, but already he could feel the tension and movement of the muscles of his arm, as though he had done it already. He stared into her face, looking for the features of a little girl he hadn’t seen in years. And he found them. In the mouth, in the eyes, in the precious precision of her chin and her nose. He used to call her Jess.
He said nothing. He waited. And when she said nothing, he said, “Come on, baby. I’ll drive you back to your dorm.”
“I’ll walk,” she said, and turned to walk away.
He knew better than to stop her.
When she reached the corner, she turned back to him. “That thing Mr. Fiore wanted you to do, Daddy,” she said. “Did you do it?”
“We don’t have to talk about that, Jess,” he said, and she knew that he had.
She smiled, a wan, sad smile. “Good,” she said. “At least someone got what they wanted out of all this.”
Rachel Bolling wasn’t sorry she married him but that still left a great many things she could be sorry about. She missed her village in Mexico and she missed her sisters. She loved her husband but she was no more a part of his life than a chicken is a farmer because it lives in the farmyard. She liked having money because she had been poor her whole life. She enjoyed being able to send money to her mother and to Ariana, the one sister who hadn’t married well. She liked her swimming pool. She liked the feel of fine clothes against her skin.
When she was first introduced to Señor Bolling in San Vittoria, her life was an endless party from the time she woke up in the afternoon until she went to bed at sunrise. It was a party before she met Señor Bolling, and he kept the party going.
Now she didn’t even like getting high anymore.
She painted pictures of her life in the village where her mother still lived, even though she hadn’t been happy there as a child and wouldn’t dream of returning. There was always a child in the pictures, a little girl, naked, breastless, wide-eyed, watching the village life as it unfolded, the way Rachel watched it now in her mind’s eye. She drew from memory because the pictures in her memory were sharper than anything she saw with her eyes.
She was twenty-five years old and she thought to herself sometimes that already she was older than she would be when she was an old woman.
Tonight, the painting on her easel displeased her. She sat before it for a long time, trying to understand why this should be so. The figures were wrong, she decided. Tonight they seemed for some reason to be people she didn’t know, strangers who didn’t correspond to anything in either her memory or her imagination. And the village was wrong, too. The mountains closed it off, as though everyone in the village were trapped there forever like a parrot in a cage. In truth, as well as in the picture in her mind, the village included the mountains the way it included the sky.
She thought for a long time about how she could fix this, and when she knew that she couldn’t do anything about it, she turned off her light and drank the last of her coffee by the moonlight that slid in through the open window.
She checked to assure herself that the alarm hadn’t been set and walked out to the pool. It was October and the air pinched at her skin, because every night this sterile land surrendered the warmth it had gathered in the day. No wonder nothing grew out of land like this.
She pulled her dress up over her head and threw it aside, then plunged naked into the pool. In an instant the chill of the water drew from her body the stifling heat that had accumulated inside her studio while she was studying her failed painting. She swam back and forth twenty laps that made her arms tingle with the strength in them. She could feel the moon moving across the sky above her, and when she was finished swimming—she knew that it was twenty laps, exactly twenty, although she hadn’t counted them—she lay on her back to feel the moonlight on her skin.
She climbed out of the water and pulled her dress over her head, letting the soft cotton dry her like a towel.
She didn’t turn on a light in the bedroom. Her husband, who often snored, was sleeping so quietly she couldn’t even hear him breathing. She dried her hair with a towel in the bathroom and left her dress there. She climbed into bed gently, so as not to disturb him, and settled her head on the pillow before she reached out her hand to rest it on his back. She knew the instant her skin touched his that he was dead.
He was the temperature of the sheets.
She felt the breath freeze in her body, so that she couldn’t have cried out even if she had been willing to let herself. She had known that someday this would happen, and she knew why it happened.
She looked at him in the moonlight. This man built churches. He was a good man. His eyes were open. His mouth was open, too, and his tongue hung out. His lungs had stopped, she thought, before his heart did. Her own father died exactly the same way, suffocating in his sleep from the damned coca.
She closed her eyes and turned her face away. But she lay there till morning, crying to herself because she hadn’t loved either one of them enough.
19
Good morning, Mr. Blaine,” Jennifer said, handing
Jeffrey his messages. “You ought to take a look at this clipping.” He was calling her Jennifer these days because she finally got up the nerve to tell him she preferred it to Jennie.
He glanced through the messages and handed them back. There wasn’t anything there that needed his attention. The clipping was only half a dozen lines from an inside page of the Oklahoma City Sentinel. It announced simply that Clint Bolling, of PetroBoll, had died in his sleep. No cause of death was stated. A family spokesman, whoever that might be, was quoted as saying that he hadn’t been ill.
He told Jennifer to hold his calls and went into his office. He had no trouble locating the online New York Times archives and calling up every article they had on Chet Fiore. He hadn’t the slightest doubt that Fiore was responsible for Bolling’s death and he wondered if he would find anything in the newspaper files that would help him understand how a man’s mind came to work the way Fiore’s did. It was a display of power like nothing Jeffrey had ever seen, for he had never before met a man for whom will and deed were synonymous. Fiore had no further need of Bolling and so Bolling ceased to exist. It was as simple as that.
As he read through the articles about Fiore, Jeffrey noted that they followed a predictable pattern. An article would mention that the District Attorney’s Office or the U.S. Attorney’s Office or a state or federal grand jury was looking into Fiore’s involvement in one racket or another. Fiore was invariably identified as a rising young star, handsome and articulate, in a crime family headed by a man named Gaetano Falcone. Three or four more articles in the next week or two would give promising follow-ups on the progress of the in
vestigation. And then Fiore’s name would drop from the papers for six months, nine months, as much as a year, when he would appear again as the subject of a new investigation into a new set of charges. Somewhere in each series it was always pointed out that Fiore had never been convicted of a crime, or even arrested.
Jeffrey found much more interesting material in a lengthy year-old article from the Times Sunday Magazine. The piece began with a scathingly satiric account of the U.S. attorney’s frustration with the chronic press leaks that torpedoed every one of its investigations into Fiore’s activities. Assistant U.S. Attorney Elaine Lester was quoted as saying that in most cases press leaks result from an improper relationship between a reporter and someone in the prosecutor’s office. In Fiore’s case, however, the leaks were spread out with almost obsessive evenhandedness among the four New York dailies. “Eeny, meeny, miney, and mo,” she called them. The same problem plagued the District Attorney’s Office. No source for the leaks had ever been found.
Jeffrey read the passage again but couldn’t tell if it meant that Elaine had actually worked on one of the Fiore investigations. Was the world really that much smaller than he imagined? He doubted it, took a moment to think through the implications, and then read on.
He learned that Fiore grew up on City Island, the son of a sanitation worker and grandson of an immigrant fisherman. As a young man, Charles—his birth certificate gave his name as Charles Chester Fiore but at some point he reversed the order of the given names—was apparently an outstanding student, so bright that he won admission to Stuyvesant High in Manhattan, the city’s most elite and demanding public high school. In fact, he attended Stuyvesant for three years before returning to City Island to graduate from the high school there. The records at Stuyvesant gave no indication of academic or disciplinary problems, leading the author of the article to conjecture that the change in the young man’s plans might have had something to do with the death of his grandfather during the summer before Charles’s senior year. The old man’s boat went down in a storm under circumstances at least suspicious enough to have prompted City Island detectives to open a file on the incident, but the investigation went no further than that. At the time, and indeed until quite recently, the fish markets of New York had been completely under mob control.
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