She said, “Jessica’s not in school anymore. She’s home in New York.”
Oh fuck, Georgie thought, but he thought it out loud.
“I’m sorry,” the tall girl said. “I’ve got her number if you want to call her. You’re a friend of Eddie’s, aren’t you?”
She stepped back from the door to let him in. Maybe the drive out wasn’t going to be a waste after all.
He looked around and was surprised to see he was standing in a totally nothing little room. Georgie had an apartment of his own, which may not have been much but it had a forty-eight-inch TV and a couch you could lie all the way down on. It made this place look like a shithole. So it was at least slightly possible that, Yale or no Yale, under the right circumstances this girl would be impressed.
She found the number in a little book and handed it to him.
“Do I have to dial anything, like for an outside line?” he asked.
She was standing right next to him, her shoulder practically touching his shoulder. “It’s just a regular phone,” she said.
He dialed the number and a girl’s voice answered. She sounded very young. “Jessica?” he asked. Then he said, “Jessica Blaine?” (The girl smiled, like there was something funny about that.) “Listen,” he said, “this is Georgie Vallo. Eddie’s friend, right. He asked me to call you. He’s in the hospital.”
He listened a minute and then he said, “Well, he had a problem. He wants to see you. It’s Montefiore, do you know where that is?”
She couldn’t have said very much because he said almost right away, “I was supposed to give you a ride, see, but I’m up in New Haven. He figured that’s where you were going to be.” Then he said, “Great, yeah, great,” and hung up the phone.
The tall girl said, “You drove all the way out here to take her to see your friend in the hospital?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“You’re a very good friend,” she said.
That’s when Georgie Vallo knew he was going to get laid.
Schliester didn’t say a word on the drive back from Brooklyn. He let Gogarty do all the talking while his own mind turned sickening somersaults. He couldn’t get his mind off Benini’s daughter and some of the things she said. He’s got to have his breakfast, she said. It’s important. That was the first time. The second time she screamed. And the third time, just a couple minutes ago, she said, Daddy wouldn’t do that.
Which was exactly right. Daddy wouldn’t. Chet Fiore would. Chet Fiore would throw a harmless little man into Long Island Sound. With Wally Schliester’s help, thank you very much.
When they got back to the office, Schliester told Gogarty he wanted to walk around and think a little. Or not think, if at all possible. Not think would be better.
He bought himself a coffee at a lunch cart at the foot of one of the piers and walked out to the end. He could hear the water lapping under his feet and he tried to put everything except the sound of it out of his mind. The East River was a river but it didn’t flow like one and didn’t sound like one. It sounded more like a beach. It smelled like one, too. Salt water, when the tide was up and the river ran backward. In St. Louis you could stand at the water’s edge for a million years and you would never once see the Mississippi run backward. In this fucked-up city it happened twice a day.
He came to the house. He could hear the girl’s voice again in his ears. I told him Daddy went with you.
He cocked his head as though he had just heard his name being called. He narrowed his eyes as he looked out over the water and played her words back a second time. He came to the house. Why did Chet Fiore come to Gus Benini’s house? It wasn’t a social call. He knew something was up before he got there. How could he have known? How could he possibly have known?
Something was wrong here and Schliester didn’t know what it was. He went back to the beginning, going over everything he knew about the case, from that night in February when he and Gogarty tailed Fiore to a birthday party for a banker’s kid. Dennis Franciscan blew a gasket because of that fucked-up chase through Prospect Park in a civilian car that had to be towed out of the snow. Okay, that made sense. Franciscan liked things neat and there was nothing neat about that night. The next morning, though, Elaine Lester was all over the two of them. She wanted the case. And when Franciscan got caught wagging his dick at an inappropriate moment, she came back at them again. She was interested in the banker. She said making a case on the banker was going to get her an office with windows.
All of a sudden he heard Gus’s voice in his mind. Something about a banker. Was that the way he put it?
Schliester dumped his coffee cup into a trash can and ran back to the office. He yanked open the file cabinet and found the tape of their interview with Benini. He listened with earphones because he didn’t want Gogarty hearing what he was listening to. Gogarty asked and he waved him away.
He sped the tape forward. He knew about where it was, an hour into it, maybe a little less. He wanted the exact words. He jockeyed back and forth until he found the spot. I don’t know, Gus was saying. I keep hearing something about a banker, something about cleaning up the money, something something, I don’t know what it is. It’s just something I hear, but that’s all I can tell you, that’s all I know.
And then Elaine’s voice on the tape: Well, let’s move on to something you do know something about.
Let’s move on? Was she fucking kidding? What banker? Who do you hear this from, Gus? If you heard that much, you heard more. These were the things that should have been said. She should have made him say more, and if it turned out he really didn’t know any more, she should have given him some homework before they sent him home. Find out about this banker and get back to us.
How the fuck does a person who knew eight months ago that linking Chet Fiore to a banker would get her an office with windows suddenly lose interest? Let’s move on. Where exactly were they moving on to?
He hit the stop button and rewound the tape, impatient as the reels spun. Gogarty had gone back to his desk but now he came over again and asked him what he’d found. Schliester didn’t answer. When the end of the tape slapped off the reel, he stopped the machine, returned the tape to the file cabinet, and walked into Elaine’s office without knocking on the door.
She was reading something and writing notes, and she held up a hand without looking up. He waited while she finished what she was writing and capped her pen—she always used a fountain pen—and then she looked up at him but didn’t say anything. Waiting for him to say something. First he waited, now she was waiting. It was a hell of a note.
Their first night together at his apartment had also been their last. He didn’t know why. The next time he asked her to meet him for a drink, she asked him if they couldn’t talk in the office. He tried another time and she said the same thing. She didn’t explain, and Schliester wasn’t going to ask. He didn’t need diagrams.
He couldn’t think how he was going to say what he wanted to say but he gave it a try. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “How come you weren’t interested when Benini said something about a banker?”
It was best this way. Just ask it straight out.
She was on her feet now. “Is that what this is about?” she demanded angrily.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a legitimate question.”
“I am interested,” she said. “Very interested. Of course I’m interested. You didn’t want me to tell Benini that, did you?”
He wanted to make sure he was getting this right. “You were going to follow up on it?” he asked.
“I am going to follow up on it,” she said.
“No, you’re not,” he said. “Benini’s dead.”
She seemed genuinely surprised. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s in the Brooklyn morgue. They fished him out of the water this morning. Too bad we didn’t ask him about the banker when we had the chance.”
She took a step toward him. “What the hell are you g
etting at?” she demanded angrily.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
On the long subway ride to the Bronx, Jessica wished she had asked Georgie Vallo why Eddie was in the hospital. But the call was so quick she didn’t even get a chance to think.
The hospital was a depressing fortress in red brick, the perfect match for Jessica’s mood by the time she got there. Objective correlative. Professor Hairston, who taught Jessica’s freshman English course, was absolutely obsessed with the phrase. As though it explained everything. Poetry was full of objective correlatives for the emotions it was trying to convey. Stories were full of them, novels were full of them. Well, life had objective correlatives of its own, she thought, and this place was sure as hell one of them. For that matter, while she was on the subject, how about the name? Montefiore. Mountain of Fiore. Whatever that meant. Very symbolic, the way it tied everything together.
The lady in the lobby directed her to a ward on the fourth floor. It was like a scene from The English Patient, she thought, and then realized, while she was still standing in the doorway, that she had never visited anyone in a hospital who wasn’t in a private room.
There were eight beds along each wall, all of them occupied. At first she thought she had been sent to the wrong place, because all she could see was old men. She hesitated a moment and then walked into the ward, tentative and unsure. She felt the eyes of the men on her, as intrusive as hands on her body, feeling her up. An old man, skinny as a scarecrow, licked his lips and put his hands under the covers, playing with himself.
And then she saw Eddie. Or was it Eddie? She thought she saw his eyes on her, from the corner bed, and she hurried forward. The room smelled of sickness, a close, fetid smell of bodies and urine and dressings on wounds. She stopped short, still half a dozen feet from the foot of his bed.
It was Eddie, and it wasn’t. His face, the part of it she could see, was livid purple, and the other side of it, even his eye on that side, was covered with bandages held in place by strips of tape that ran across his forehead and under his chin. His lips were swollen, cracked, and oddly slack, as though the muscles that made them work had ceased functioning, so that his face looked like something drawn on a balloon that was losing its air.
He said something, but his voice was so thick and slurred that she couldn’t make out the words.
“Eddie, what happened?” she asked as she stepped closer.
“D’ya like?” he asked, croaking the words at her.
She was sure that was what he said, but it didn’t make sense. He gestured with a wave of crooked fingers, and it was only then that she noticed that his right hand was completely encased in a heavy cast that extended up past his wrist. She stepped to the side of the bed and bent to him, so she could hear what he had to say. His one eye moved over her face, from her lips to her eyes to her hair, back to her eyes again, as though he had to process her piece by piece.
“What is it, Eddie?” she asked, because he didn’t say anything.
“Hand. All broke,” he said. “All of it.”
“Oh god, Eddie,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. He saw them and made a weak and crooked attempt at a smile.
“Comes off, y’know,” he mumbled. “Skin. Skin comes right off. Bet y’didn’t know that.”
The fingers on his good hand waved in front of his face.
She felt sick to her stomach and tried not to think about what he was telling her. “Don’t talk about that, Eddie,” she whispered. “Don’t think about that.”
“Yeah,” he said. “How ’bout kiss? Gimme kiss.”
“C’mon, Eddie,” she pleaded, desperation in her voice now. In her mind she could see under the bandages, the raw meat of his body, pulsing red and sticky with blood. She fought off another wave of nausea, fought with herself to keep from looking away.
She saw his hand move, and could have reacted if she had her wits about her. Gripped by a paralyzing passivity, she let his hand catch her, clutching the front of her shirt above her breasts. And then his hand went tight and he jerked her toward him, pulling hard, pulling her face to his, almost costing her her balance. She had to slap a hand down on the bed—not the bed, his shoulder—to keep from falling over onto him and he made an awful sound from the pain, not a scream, not a groan, more like the calls she sometimes heard at night in Bedford Falls when an owl caught some little animal that shrilled its distress before it died.
She tried to move her hand off his shoulder but he wouldn’t let go of her, even though the pain must have been terrible. His right arm came up, the one with the damaged hand, and he flung it around behind her, his forearm at the back of her neck, and pulled her down until their lips touched. His lips felt soft and gummy. She heard a strange, cackling laugh that couldn’t have come from Eddie, and she felt a hand on her butt, under her skirt, which had ridden up as she fell forward. She felt rough fingers on her panties, at the tops of her thighs, probing the fabric, pushing it aside, prying into the crack of her butt.
She was fighting desperately now, flailing to get free of Eddie and free of the groping stranger in the next bed. She managed to turn sideways and the hand caught her skirt, but at least it wasn’t touching her skin anymore. She pulled back from Eddie just at the moment he released her, and she lost her balance and fell to the floor between the two beds. She heard the sound of footsteps hurrying toward her and a man’s voice called out, “All right, leave her alone, leave her alone.”
A black orderly ran toward her, down the line of beds.
Even with help coming, the man in the next bed grabbed for her again. He was a fat old man and he leered at her idiotically, grinning like a child who has done something naughty but adorable.
“Are you all right? What’s going on here?” the orderly demanded, striking an authoritative pose.
Jessica pointed a finger at the old man.
“You’re giving this girl trouble, Howard?” the orderly said. “We’ve had enough out of you.”
He kicked at the wheels of the bed, releasing the brakes. Before Jessica even understood what he was about to do, he was wheeling the bed into the aisle. The old man didn’t change his expression, the grin plastered on his face like a mask. “Sorry about this, miss,” the orderly said, and in a moment the bed was rolling rapidly away.
“You don’t have to do that,” Jessica called helplessly after him.
She had a vague sense that it was somehow her fault, that the old man couldn’t help what he did, that he was being banished over something that was really, now that it was over, nothing.
“Worth it?” Eddie said, and she turned back to him, as though for a moment she had almost forgotten he was there. She didn’t understand, except that it felt as though she were caught in the middle of a nightmare.
“Where are they taking him?” she asked. “They don’t have to do that.”
“Not him! Me!” Eddie shouted, his voice suddenly sharp and clear, like the barking of a dog. “You think you’re worth it? You think you’re worth this?”
His good hand formed a claw in front of his anguished face, as though he were going to scratch the bandages off to show her.
“What are you talking about?” she pleaded, confused.
“Your old man sent the guys who did this,” he said. “Protecting his little girl.”
Somewhere in the deepest recesses of her mind she had known he was going to say that. She wanted not to believe him, and made herself not believe him. But at the same time she knew it was true.
“Cheek’s all busted and the skin came off,” he said. “Kicked me. Kicked me till the skin came off. Hoping I’d just pass out. Couldn’t. Couldn’t. Standing on my hand. Heard the bones break.”
“Oh god, Eddie,” she moaned. Her hand went toward his face, to touch him and offer comfort, but it stopped short and hung in the air.
“Just a warning, kid, he says. Man wants you to leave his daughter alone. That’s what he said. Next time there won’t be nothing left.
”
24
Tailing someone in New York City is the easiest thing in the world. In the daytime anyway, when there’s traffic. In a snowstorm at night it’s a different story, and neither Schliester nor Gogarty could quite manage to forget the nightmare of the last time they tried following Chet Fiore. But take away the snow and add a million and a half cars, and all of a sudden it’s impossible for anyone to twig to the fact that someone is shadowing his every turn.
On the other hand, Schliester wouldn’t have half minded letting Fiore know he had company. As he and Gogarty sat at a sidewalk table in front of a coffeehouse on Elizabeth Street across the street and one door down from Seppi’s, Fiore’s restaurant hangout, they debated the point over cappuccinos. “I want him to see us,” Schliester said. “Everyfuckingwhere he goes. I want him to see my face in the mirror when he shaves in the morning.”
Gogarty shook his head. “You just want to drive him crazy. Exactly what good does that do us?”
“It does me good,” Schliester said.
Gogarty took a loud, slurping sip of his cappuccino and licked the foam off his lips. “Before there was a Starbucks on every corner,” he said, “before there was one in every city, before there was even one Starbucks in Seattle, which I believe is where they all come from, these people right here are the people who invented this shit. Which beats whiskey, if you ask me, and that’s coming from an Irishman.”
“Great,” Schliester said. He was in a foul mood. “Let’s hear it for the wonderful folks who gave us cappuccino and organized crime.”
“Don’t knock organized crime, boychik,” Gogarty said. “Where would we be without it?”
Schliester took a taste of the cappuccino. As far as he was concerned it was just coffee. “Come on,” he said, “we can jerk ourselves off watching him drive around all day or we can get in his face. Which is it going to be?”
“Let me ask you a not unrelated question. Are you shtupping Miss Lester?”
“How the fuck is that related to anything?”
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