“That’s a yes?”
“How the fuck is that related?” Schliester repeated.
“All right, I’ll answer yours but you’ve got to promise to answer mine,” Gogarty said. “It’s related in the context that if we were to do anything so incredibly stupid as to purposely botch a surveillance, it would help to know that at least one of us enjoyed a good relationship with the small-breasted but long-legged lady we both work for.”
“What in hell would give you a ridiculous idea like that?” Schliester asked, putting the appropriate indignation in his voice. The fact of the matter was he did not have a special relationship with Elaine Lester. Not anymore, not by a long shot.
“I’m a trained investigator, boychik,” Gogarty said.
“You followed us?” Schliester asked. Now the indignation was genuine.
It was answered with a bray of triumphant laughter. “Fell into the trap, boychik,” Gogarty brayed. “Gogarty always gets his man.”
But he didn’t have time to enjoy the moment. Chet Fiore and Jimmy Angelisi came out of Seppi’s and turned right, walking away from the two agents on the opposite side of the street. “Settle up,” Gogarty said. “I’ll get the car.”
He got to his feet, drained the last of his cappuccino, and hurried off while Schliester attempted to engage the attention of their waiter. Somehow Gogarty always managed to disappear just before it was time to pay the check.
Schliester turned one way and the other. Fiore and his man were almost a block away in one direction and Gogarty was just reaching the car in the other. He must have run. Inside the coffeehouse, the waiter stood at the bar with his back to the door, deep in intimate conversation with the girl who worked the coffee machines. Schliester reached into his pocket for his money, peeled off a ten, and dropped it on the table. Without a receipt, this was going to be out of his pocket.
The thought passed through his mind as he stepped onto the sidewalk that Chet Fiore didn’t sweat the change from a ten dollar bill and had probably never gotten a receipt for anything in his life. That difference about summed it all up.
Gogarty was already rolling toward him. He stepped around the wooden railing that separated the outdoor tables from the sidewalk and hurried into the street to get in on the passenger side. A shrill voice called after him, “Hey, mister, the check.”
All of a sudden this kid was a waiter again.
“I left a ten on the table,” Schliester said.
“The bill’s twelve,” the waiter said, holding up the ten like it was State’s Exhibit 1.
“Twelve dollars? For coffee?”
“Cappuccino,” the kid corrected.
“I don’t care what it is. Twelve dollars for two cups of coffee—you’ve got to be kidding.”
“Four,” the kid said.
Right. They had refills.
The kid said, “Twelve forty-eight with the tax.”
Schliester stepped back to the railing, pulling a five out of his pocket. He held it out and then jerked it back when the kid reached for it. “The check,” he said.
He stuck the check in his pocket and handed over the five. Then he got in the car.
Up ahead, Fiore’s Mercedes was pulling away from the curb. It turned onto Mulberry.
“I got him. Piece of cake,” Gogarty said. “You were gonna stiff the guy?”
“I wasn’t gonna stiff the guy. Can you believe a couple cups of coffee is twelve forty-eight with the tax?”
Gogarty didn’t know whether he believed it or not. “For the record, I wasn’t following either you or Ms. Lester,” he said. “There’s a kind of leering way a man looks at a woman when he’s wondering what goodies she’s got in her skirt and there’s a way he looks at her when he knows the answer. You had the latter look.”
“It’s over,” Schliester said. “It was one night. I didn’t pass the test.”
The Mercedes headed straight uptown on Lafayette, then on Park. In the Forties, just above Grand Central, Fiore told Jimmy to turn right.
A couple blocks later he said, “There she is, pull in here.”
Jimmy eased the car to the curb behind a Volvo station wagon with its warning lights flashing. A woman stood by the Volvo. She was just a couple inches over five feet tall, definitely on the plump side, definitely on the wrong side of fifty. Her hair looked like it wouldn’t move in a stiff wind. She was wearing a Chanel suit, nothing cheap about it. She had large, heavy breasts that she was obviously proud of. Her name was Emily Rudin and she was generally regarded as the most important real estate broker on the East Side of Manhattan.
She took the hand Fiore offered with chubby, perfectly manicured fingers that could have been a display rack from Tiffany’s. She wore rings on every finger, two or three of them, up to the first knuckle. He apologized for keeping her waiting and she said it was no problem. She took a key ring with a dozen keys from her pocketbook but he stopped her, explaining that they were waiting for someone else to join them.
“Of course,” Ms. Rudin chirped. “I should have known a handsome man like you wouldn’t be looking for a house by himself.”
They were standing in front of a four-story town house in the East Forties, a few blocks from the United Nations. There were crescent-moon cornices over the front door and some of the first-floor windows and triangular cornices over the windows above. The combination struck Fiore as curiously mismatched.
“There’s quite a story behind it,” Emily Rudin said. “It was built by one of the Astors. Not John Jacob, I don’t think, but I’m not quite sure. I have it in the car if you’d like.”
She took a step toward her Volvo but he held out a hand to stop her. “That’s all right,” he said. “One Astor is pretty much as good as another.”
She laughed, a curious, tinkling laugh, like glassware rattling. She knew that he was a gangster and had been expecting a snarling creature out of an Edward G. Robinson movie even though her secretary had warned her that this particular gangster was famously handsome.
“Well,” she said, gathering her momentum for a fresh start, “whichever Astor it was, he built the house for his daughter. She had a great deal to do with the design, a very artistic young lady. She was supposed to move in with her husband as soon as they got back from their honeymoon, but she ran off to Europe with some painter or poet, I’m not sure which, a week before her wedding. Her father gave the house to the young man.”
“The painter?”
“Oh my, no,” she gasped, with almost a giggle. “That would have been incredibly romantic, wouldn’t it? He gave it to the young man she rejected. But he never found anyone to live here with him and sold it the moment old man Astor died. Students of these things say that some of the paradoxical features of the house—I noticed you looking at the windows—reflect the divided nature of the girl’s soul. That’s a lovely notion, isn’t it?”
He wouldn’t have called it lovely, or a notion for that matter, but yes, there was something kind of sad and touching in the story. “What happened to her?” he asked.
“What happened to whom?” a woman’s voice asked.
They turned as Phyllis Blaine approached them. She leaned in to plant a kiss on the cheek of Ms. Rudin, whom she called Emily, and then favored Fiore with the same greeting.
“What a surprise,” Emily Rudin said with that little glassware laugh. “Mr. Fiore didn’t tell me it was you we were waiting for. I assumed it was a lady friend.”
They all laughed at that.
“I’m here strictly in my capacity as expert,” Phyllis said. “What were you two talking about?”
“The Astor girl,” Emily said, sorting through the keys as they moved to the front door. “I don’t imagine he wants me to go through the story again. Perhaps he can fill you in later.”
“You didn’t tell me what happened to her,” Fiore reminded her as she opened the front door, pushing it back and standing aside.
“Oh, I’m sure I don’t know,” Emily Rudin said. “The literature
on the house doesn’t go into that. She was out of the picture, you see.”
They found themselves in an immense entry hall. The brilliant whiteness of the freshly painted walls made it feel even more vast. An enormous staircase, like something out of Gone With the Wind, rose up to the second floor. “It will make quite an impression when it’s decorated,” Emily Rudin said.
Phyllis raised an eyebrow. “A bit monstrous,” she said. “You’re definitely going to have to do something about these walls.”
Fiore didn’t think it was monstrous at all. He could picture himself in this hall already. There would be a couple tables, with a vase or something like that on them. And a big grandfather clock. He could see himself opening the door for his guests.
Then it struck him that people who live in houses like this don’t open the door for their guests themselves, but he wasn’t ready to deal with that part of it yet. If he wanted to open the door himself, there was no law against it.
Emily Rudin led them through a series of downstairs rooms until they came to a wood-paneled study. It reminded Fiore of the Partners Room at Layne Bentley. He looked at Phyllis to see if she was as impressed as he was, but he couldn’t tell. “What’s upstairs?” he asked Ms. Rudin.
“The living quarters.”
“The bedrooms?”
“That’s right,” she said.
Fiore nodded. “I’d like to talk with Mrs. Blaine,” he said. “You couldn’t leave us here with a key, could you?”
No one had ever asked her that before. It seemed odd. But there was nothing they could take. Even if he was a gangster, he wasn’t a petty thief. “I don’t see why not,” Emily said, reaching into her suit jacket for the key.
“We’ll drop it by your office,” Phyllis promised. Then they walked Ms. Rudin to the front door, where they waited in the doorway like a married couple seeing off the guests. When she got into her car, Fiore closed the door and gestured with a sweep of his hand toward the staircase. “The living quarters, madame,” he said.
“By all means, sir,” she answered.
He followed her up the stairs. They paused at the top for a look at the entrance hall from this vantage point. The excess of it made her uncomfortable. “Could you really live in a place like this?” she asked.
He smiled, a very open and boyish smile. He had smiled like that when she walked into the room that morning he came to the house in Bedford Hills. As though he had been waiting for her.
There are men who make women feel that way. It seemed to Phyllis that years ago, before Jessica was born, Jeffrey had been one of them.
“Sure, I could live here,” he said. “Your husband tells me I’ve got too much disposable income, I’ve got to dispose of some of it.”
They both laughed. Not about the money. About his mentioning Jeffrey. If he was testing to see whether it made her uncomfortable, it didn’t.
He followed her through the door to the first bedroom they came to. It had a fireplace with a stonework facing and a slate mantel. Phyllis walked over to it and Fiore came up behind her. He put his hand on her shoulder, and her back straightened almost convulsively, as though a powerful current had just run the length of her body. She leaned back slightly, into him, her spine pressing against him.
He pushed the hair from the back of her neck and let his lips touch there lightly. He could feel the pressure of her body against him. And then she turned and buried her lips in his, her hands pulling at her skirt until it rose above her hips.
He fucked her against the wall until she came, and then he fucked her again on the floor.
Schliester and Gogarty were watching from the roof of a convenient building. When they saw the real estate lady driving off, they more or less guessed what was going to happen, so Schliester raced to the car for their surveillance camera while Gogarty used his badge to secure entry to the four-story building across the street. They got to the roof in time to get some damn good pictures of Fiore and his lady friend in the upstairs bedroom. Then, when Fiore and the lady left the bedroom, the two federal agents ran back down the stairs, getting to the foyer in time to see the two subjects of their surveillance coming out of the town house. Fiore’s car was waiting only a dozen yards away, with the motor running and Jimmy Angelisi behind the wheel, but Fiore didn’t head toward it. Instead, he walked the lady up the street.
“That’s not one of his usual babes,” Schliester whispered. “I’d love to know who the hell she is.”
Fiore walked the lady around the corner and up Second Avenue. A car was waiting under a NO STANDING sign just up from a bus stop, a black driver behind the wheel. Fiore shook the woman’s hand.
“Married lady,” Schliester said.
When a guy fucks a woman and then shakes her hand when they get to her car, it usually means the driver works for her husband.
Gogarty was radioing in the plates when Schliester charged ahead, straight toward the couple. His badge was out.
“Federal agent, ma’am,” he said. “Your car’s parked in a no-standing zone.”
“She’s just going,” Fiore said. He noticed that the agent didn’t give his name, which he’s supposed to do whenever he identifies himself. It wasn’t hard to figure that this was probably the guy who had been dogging him since last winter—probably the same one who got Gus in trouble.
Schliester said, “I wasn’t talking to you, sir. Can I see some identification, ma’am?”
Gogarty, still on the radio, was enjoying his partner’s performance.
Phyllis had her feet planted well apart. “What is going on here?” she demanded. “What exactly is this about?”
Schliester smiled. “I told you, ma’am. Your vehicle is parked in a no-standing zone.”
“And you’re a federal agent? Since when do federal agents enforce traffic regulations?”
“I can call a police officer if you’d like, ma’am.”
“I didn’t see your identification,” Phyllis said.
“And I haven’t seen yours, ma’am.”
Gogarty lowered the radio from his ear. “This vehicle’s registered to a Jeffrey Blaine,” he said. “Would you be Mrs. Blaine?”
Schliester’s entire conception of what was happening changed in an instant. Jeffrey Blaine’s wife? What the fuck?
The lady said, “That’s right,” in answer to Gogarty’s question. And Schliester said, “Fine. Why don’t you run along home. And you, fuckface, you stay right here. We have something to talk about.”
Phyllis didn’t move.
Fiore said, “I don’t have anything to talk about with you.”
Schliester mimed disappointment. “That’s too bad,” he said. “I was hoping you’d be kind enough to deliver a message for me.”
Fiore bit. “What’s the message?” he asked.
“I wanted you to give my regards to Gus.”
Something in Fiore’s mind exploded. Any man who could make jokes about a dead man was lower than vermin.
He lunged at the agent, grabbing him by the lapels and knocking him back against the car, his face right in Schliester’s face. The bastard was actually smiling at him.
“Gee,” Schliester said, “you knew Gus passed away. How did you find out?”
Fiore hit him with a short chopping right that caught him square on the left cheek. Bone against bone, it broke the skin and sent a gush of blood running down Schliester’s face. If anyone were keeping score, it would go in the books as a one-round TKO. Before either man could take it further, Gogarty was between them. Jimmy Angelisi, who had followed the agents around the corner just to make sure there was no trouble, wrapped his arms around Fiore’s shoulders. No one had even seen him come up. “Leave him alone, leave him alone,” he was saying. “Leave him alone, boss, he ain’t worth it.”
The driver got out of Mrs. Blaine’s car and looked like he knew he was supposed to do something only he didn’t know what.
Phyllis’s hands were over her eyes. She was terrified. A disastrous scandal seemed in
evitable. They already knew her name.
Fiore tried to pull away from Jimmy, who wouldn’t let go. A steady flow of blood ran down Schliester’s cheek and dripped onto his shirt. He shook his head once, sending a shower of sticky droplets all around, and thrust a hand over Gogarty’s shoulder straight at Fiore. “I am going to get you, asshole. Take another shot. Go ahead. Take another.”
Fiore was shouting, too, shouting at Jimmy to let go of him, shouting at Gogarty to get out of the way, shouting obscenities at Schliester. And Gogarty, his massive body like a moving wall between them, kept saying, “That’s it, that’s it, it’s over. Both of you, it’s over.”
With Jimmy hanging on to Fiore and Gogarty blocking Schliester, things finally quieted down enough for Schliester to take a step backward and straighten his shoulders. “You had your shot, baby,” he taunted. “Now it’s my turn. Me and Gus.” He turned to Phyllis and said, “I’d get home if I were you, Mrs. Blaine. Your boyfriend sometimes finds it necessary to have people killed.”
“You dropped out of school?” Grace Tunney gasped. “I can’t believe it!”
Grace always seemed younger than everyone else in Jessica’s circle, but a few months of college had done remarkable things for her. Her hair was shorter and she seemed to have lost a few pounds. She didn’t look like a baby anymore.
“Believe it,” Jessica said. “It’s a long story.”
They were standing in front of the main administration building at Vassar, a stately old nineteenth-century structure that had been enlarged over the years with modern additions that seemed to poke out from behind the original facade like a kid trying to hide behind something too small to hide him.
Grace said, “I still haven’t heard the true and official story of your heavy vanish over the summer. C’mon, let’s get something to eat.”
Jessica followed her into the administration building, down a corridor lined with an exhibit of lithographs, and into an expansive cafeteria that looked like an oversized fast-food restaurant. Animated discussions were being carried on at virtually all the tables. Hands were flying everywhere as long-haired young men and short-haired young women gesticulated with forks and half-eaten sandwiches. Jessica looked at them and missed being in school. She knew perfectly well that it was all her own fault. The choices had been hers. But none of the choices were the ones she thought she was making, and so she was filled with an anger that far overrode the regret.
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