House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  He felt the bite of her teeth around him, far down his cock, like a tickle at first, thrilling and then sharper. A second later he felt pain and he felt her movement stop and he felt only the pain, sharper and sharper. He called out “Hey!” as though there had been some misunderstanding, as though she were confused about the distinction between what thrilled and what hurt, but he knew it wasn’t that, knew it already. He grabbed at her hair, wrapping his fingers in it tightly, trying to pull her back as the grip of her teeth tightened and tightened until he felt something break and her mouth filled with blood and still he couldn’t stop her, the pain unbearable now, and he thought in panic that even if he ripped handfuls of her hair from her head she would still be there like the severed head of a leech, gnawing.

  He could feel his blood spilling from her mouth onto his thighs and balls, and he thought god no don’t let her do that please and he knew only because of the clarity of the pain that she hadn’t bitten it off yet.

  She stopped. And stood up. And spat the blood from her mouth, but her lips were still colored with it.

  “Miguel will get you to a doctor,” she said. “Make sure you tell Mr. Blaine what happened.”

  He stayed in a hospital that night, and well into the next day, and then he caught the last flight back to New York. He took the rest of the week off, phoning in to say he was ill. But no, he never told Blaine what happened. He never told anyone.

  23

  When Gus Benini didn’t get in touch with

  Schliester for two days, Schliester figured it was time to get in touch with Gus. He drove out to the house, where Benini’s daughter Theresa opened the door. She started screaming the moment she saw who was there, her words almost unintelligible. She demanded to know what they did to her father, where he was, what they wanted, all of this tumbling out in unformed fragments of hysteria. “You bastards, you bastards, you bastards!” she screamed over and over.

  She began to pound on Schliester with her fists, as though he were a door that wouldn’t open.

  Schliester caught her hands and Matt Thompson, who was accompanying him again, took her firmly by the shoulders. They managed to get her inside and Schliester closed the door with his foot. She was still flailing with her hands, even though Schliester held her wrists, so that her forearms flew about like convulsed marionettes. “Listen to me, listen to me, listen to me,” he kept repeating until finally she subsided enough for him to take a chance on letting her hands go. When he released her hands, they remained trembling in the air. Thompson let go of her as well.

  Schliester knew he was good at calming things. It was a gift he had. Once, in St. Louis, he talked a man who had cut his own child into giving up the knife. It was his proudest moment as a cop, even though all his partner said afterward was, “Next time you might want to consider capping the guy.”

  The girl’s whole body trembled now, but she made no attempt to renew the assault.

  “All right now, listen to me,” Schliester said. “This is important. We didn’t do anything to your father. We talked to him and then he left. Are you telling me he hasn’t been home since then?”

  She nodded her head, her lips so tight she seemed almost to have no lips. There were no tears, but he could tell that she was crying.

  “He hasn’t called? He hasn’t been in touch?”

  She shook her head.

  From upstairs, a voice called, “What’s the matter, Theresa? What’s going on down there?”

  “It’s all right, Mama, it’s nothing. Go back to bed,” Theresa called back, finding a calmness somewhere that she managed to put into her voice for her mother’s sake.

  Benini was nothing more than a cheap little gangster, Schliester thought. Not a bad guy, just a little on the sleazy side. How did people like that end up with kids like this?

  A frail-looking woman in a faded bathrobe started down the stairs, her left hand gripping the banister. Her skin was the color of paper. “I heard screaming,” she said.

  Theresa started up the stairs and helped her mother down. “Who are these men?” Mrs. Benini asked her daughter as the two of them picked their way to the foot of the stairs.

  “They’re policemen, Mama,” Theresa said.

  “Did something happen to your father?”

  “No, Mama.”

  Schliester took Mrs. Benini’s arm, which felt as lifeless as a stick, and, with Theresa’s help, escorted her to a couch in the living room. There was an electric fireplace with fake logs.

  He explained as carefully as he could that her husband had been brought in for questioning about some illegal activities but that he wasn’t in trouble because he agreed to cooperate. “Sometimes when a man does that, he has second thoughts,” he said. “He may have gone off by himself to think it over for a few days. I’m sure he’ll be in touch with you.”

  Both women nodded as though he had said something eminently sensible.

  “Do you understand what I just told you?” he said, looking from mother to daughter. “He’s not in trouble. But it’s important that he get in touch with me.”

  He handed the girl a card.

  “Please,” he said. “Make sure he calls me. I can help him. Nobody else can.”

  Both women nodded again.

  When Schliester got back to the office, he sat down with Elaine and Gogarty to analyze the situation. They all figured Benini was scared and he was running. If they could bring him in, calm him down, promise him protection, they could still save six months of work that would go down the crapper otherwise. Schliester filled out the paperwork and put it out on the air.

  At about the time he was doing this, the doorbell at the Benini house rang again. Mrs. Benini was still on the couch, covered with a blanket now.

  Standing on the stoop, New York City detective Raul Alvarez waited for someone to answer the door. All he knew was that a body had washed up on the shore at Jones Beach like a piece of driftwood. The body was naked and no clothes were found anywhere near the site, so there was no telling where he had gone into the water, although it might have been possible, with tide tables and a good guess as to the time of death, to figure it out. The body was identified by fingerprints, which is the only known benefit of having a criminal record. Otherwise, the family would have had to live with the uncertainty of not knowing.

  The detective didn’t say any of this. What he said, when a girl opened the door, was, “My name is Detective Raul Alvarez. I’d like to speak with the wife of Gus Benini.”

  Theresa already knew what he was going to tell her. Her stomach clenched like a fist. “She’s lying down,” she said. “I’m his daughter.”

  “There seems to have been an accident, miss,” the detective said. “We’ll need you to come with us to make an identification.”

  Theresa nodded numbly and went back into the house. All she told her mother was that she had to go out. She didn’t want to say more just in case it wasn’t true.

  The answer came back almost before Schliester put the question out on the air. Detective Caz Armintella of the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control unit called the federal task force office. “What’s this about you guys wanting Benini?” he asked.

  It was Gogarty who took his call. “Right. We want him,” he said.

  There was a brief silence while Armintella sized up the wiseassed fed on the other end of the line. Then he said, “Yeah, okay, no problem. You want him, you can have him. Meet me at the Brooklyn morgue in half an hour.”

  Gogarty said, “What’s he doing at the morgue?”

  “He’s been inducted into the next world,” Armintella said. “He’s taking his physical.”

  Schliester could hear only one end of the conversation, but that end contained the word morgue. “Gus?” he asked when Gogarty hung up the phone.

  “Yeah, Gus,” Gogarty confirmed.

  Forty-five minutes later Gogarty and Schliester walked through the door at the basement drop-off entrance of the King’s County Morgue. The air felt like it hadn’
t been changed in weeks. Armintella was waiting for them.

  “I hope we’re not too late,” Gogarty said. “He’s still dead, isn’t he?”

  Armintella smiled. He was a big guy, heavier than he should have been, but he looked like he knew how to carry it. If you were choosing up sides for a brawl, you’d pick him in a minute. When he asked why the feds were looking for Benini, Schliester answered him before Gogarty could get in the way. “We had him on a shakedown thing,” he said. “We brought him in and we gave him the usual choices. He went home to think it over.”

  “Let me guess. He could go to jail or he could help you out,” Armintella said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Or he could take all his clothes off and go for a swim in the fucking ocean.”

  Schliester bristled at the cheap shot. He was being blamed for the man’s death.

  “Next question,” Armintella said. “What kind of cooperation were you looking for?”

  “Full and sincere.”

  “It wouldn’t have concerned Chet Fiore by any chance, would it?”

  “I don’t know what he was going to say,” Schliester said. “He never got around to saying it.”

  Now it was Armintella’s turn to take offense. He took a step forward, his belly preceding him. “I’ve got a homicide here,” he said, “so let’s not play games.”

  And then a voice behind him said, “Excuse me but I’m not sure that you do.”

  The new arrival was a small and dainty-looking man in lab whites. He had no chin and a big nose, and he introduced himself as Dr. Grimm, which wasn’t a bad name for a man in his line of work. “The man drowned,” he said. “Water in the lungs. No question about that. Of course that leaves open the possibility of another party or parties drowning him or helping him drown. Evidence? No. No evidence whatsoever. What was I looking for? Abrasions, contusions, anything that might suggest a force applied to hold him under the water. Neck, body, arms, face. Other possibilities? Of course. He could have been rendered unconscious, chemically or by means of a blow. Chemically? No. There was nothing in his blood but blood. That leaves a blow. No sign of one. The evidence would have been subtle, mind you. When death eventuates shortly after an injury, there is very little bruising. A lot of pathologists, even good pathologists, could miss the signs.”

  “But not you?” Gogarty prompted.

  Dr. Grimm smiled. “Ask around,” he said smugly. “I’m thorough. I’m listing this as an accidental drowning or a suicide, depending on the life circumstances of the decedent. You don’t have a homicide.”

  “These gentlemen will fill you in on the life circumstances,” Armintella said, already in motion toward the door. Whether the doctor was right about there being no homicide was beside the point, because once he filed his report there was certainly going to be no homicide case. It’s hard enough to prove murder under the best of circumstances, impossible when the medical examiner says there hasn’t been one.

  Gogarty waited until the door closed behind the organized crime detective. Then he said, “The decedent was under investigation. We invited him to cooperate against certain underworld figures and he was thinking it over.”

  Grimm nodded, the nod of a man who now knows what to put in the few remaining blanks on his form. He turned to go but Schliester said, “Don’t put anything down yet. I’d like another talk with his family.”

  “His daughter’s upstairs,” Grimm said. He gave directions to the viewing room.

  The corridor smelled like formaldehyde, if that’s what formaldehyde smelled like. If death was a business and it had a head office, this was it.

  Gogarty tagged along next to his partner. “Whatever you’re thinking, boychik,” he said, “don’t bother thinking it. When the white parrot says case closed, that means case closed. You can’t open it with pliers.”

  Gogarty was right. Grimm did look like a parrot.

  “I don’t care about opening the goddamned case,” Schliester said.

  “What do you care about?”

  “I just want to know, that’s all,” Schliester snapped. “I knew the guy, I worked him, I want to know. Is that so hard to understand?”

  It wasn’t. Gogarty didn’t work that way himself. But he understood.

  Viewing rooms at city morgues weren’t what they used to be. When a body is to be identified, they roll open the drawer of the refrigerated cabinet where it’s stored and point two television cameras at it, one low, mounted to the side, the other set in the ceiling. The bereaved wait in a little windowless room until an attendant comes in and turns on the TV. In Theresa Benini’s case it had been a long wait. She was alone in a big waiting room for over an hour before a dark-skinned Indian man came to get her. He was carrying a clipboard. He took her to the little room without windows. “You sit down, please, miss,” he said in that pretty accent they have. Theresa always liked that accent. She sat down in one of three chairs lined up in front of the television mounted on the wall and he turned on the set. She took a breath and held it while she waited for the picture to come on.

  Two pictures came on actually, split screen, next to each other. Front and side, like those police pictures. As though he had already been arrested and convicted and sentenced and even executed. She broke down and cried when she saw him, cried as though she had never let herself cry before, not over a broken toy or a broken date or a ruined love affair. All these things had happened in her life and the crying for them didn’t count anymore.

  The Indian man let her cry for a long time and then he was standing in front of her holding a paper cup of water in his hand. She took it and drank it down, and it was then that she noticed that the television was off now. It was like her father had been taken away from her one more time.

  “Please,” the Indian man said in that lovely singsong voice, “it is required that you sign this.”

  He handed her the clipboard and a pen. The blanks on the form had been filled out by hand with her name and her address and other information of that nature, which she vaguely remembered giving them when she first got there. There was also information about her father, which she was sure she hadn’t given them. She didn’t read all the words but she knew what they meant. She signed where he showed her to sign and handed the clipboard back. “Can you turn it on again?” she asked.

  “No, miss,” he said, “that is not possible.”

  There was a little light down in the mortuary that went on when the TV set was turned on and off when it was turned off so that they would know when the viewing was over and they could put the body away.

  He told her she could stay a little while if she liked and even offered to stay with her.

  “No, you don’t have to do that,” she said.

  He brought her another drink of water and left.

  She stared at the blank screen for a few minutes and then stared at nothing, really. She realized she hadn’t asked anyone how he died and now she was sorry. Her pocketbook was on the floor between her feet and she bent over to pick it up and then stood up just as the door opened and the government agent who said he was the only one who could help her father came in.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Benini,” he said. “I really am.”

  She tried not to look at him as she walked to the door and he stepped aside to let her pass. She had no intention of saying a word to him or listening to a word he said. He said he could help her father and this was how he helped.

  As she stepped through the door he said, “The coroner is saying it was suicide.”

  She stopped walking as abruptly as if a bolt of lightning had come down from the sky and struck the earth at her feet. She felt like she was going to be sick. “No,” she said without turning to face him. “Daddy wouldn’t do that.”

  That was what Schliester thought, too. Fiore could have had the man killed without leaving anything for Dr. Thorough to find. Schliester had no doubt of that. What he couldn’t understand was how Fiore found out so quickly that Benini had been taken in f
or questioning.

  “You have to help me, then, miss,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out if there’s any way Chet Fiore might have known that your father was under investigation.”

  He was just fishing, but he wanted Fiore for this murder more than he had ever wanted anything in his life.

  The girl gasped and looked so much like she was going to pass out that Schliester put out a hand to steady her. “Oh my god,” she cried, “I did it. He came to the house. I told him Daddy went with you. Oh my god oh my god oh my god.”

  There was nothing more for either of them to say, the cop and the orphaned child of a petty gangster. Both of them were thinking the same thing in different ways. Gus Benini was a harmless little man, and yet it took four people to kill him. There was Chet Fiore, who gave the order. And there was someone else, who actually did the deed.

  And there was Wally Schliester, who was trying to tell himself he was only doing his job.

  And finally there was Theresa Benini. Who set it up, too, even though she was only trying to help.

  Georgie Vallo drove all the way out to New Haven in his brother-in-law’s car. Eddie had given him good directions—amazing considering the shape he was in—so he found the dorm without any trouble. Which was a good thing, because he didn’t like talking to the kind of people he would have had to talk to on the Yale campus if he was going to ask directions. They pissed him off. They thought they knew everything just because they had money and went to an expensive college.

  When he knocked on the door he was thinking that he wasn’t even sure he remembered what Eddie’s girl looked like, but he knew when a girl opened the door that this wasn’t her. She was tall, maybe an inch taller than he was, a couple inches taller than Eddie. Who would never go out with a girl that tall. He was touchy on the subject.

  Georgie, though, wouldn’t have half minded. He took a minute to take her in from top to bottom, especially the bottom, and then he said, “I’m looking for Jessica Blaine.”