House of Lords
Page 49
He told her he was still interested in bringing the men who killed her husband to justice. He wanted her help.
“Every day after he died,” she said, “before the funeral, after the funeral, even on the day of his funeral, the police told me I knew who killed him. They wanted me to tell them. But I don’t know. And I don’t understand why you’re asking me again now.”
“I’m not sure I understand it myself,” Schliester said. “Sometimes we can’t put these things behind us either.”
“Either?” she said, very softly. “I’m not sure that I haven’t.”
When he left City Island, Schliester drove to Jimmy Angelisi’s apartment in the Bronx. It was the middle of the afternoon. Jimmy had been working on a model sailboat and his hands were crusty with glue. “Let’s go outside where we can talk,” Schliester said. “Do you have to put that stuff away?”
“It’ll be fine,” Jimmy said, capping the glue and adjusting the order of some of the pieces on the table. He got his coat and shouted to someone in the bedroom that he was going out for a few minutes.
There was a bare hedge that ran along the side of the apartment building, separated from the sidewalk by an ankle-high iron railing. Almost all of the winter’s snow was gone, but a few dirty patches from a two-week-old storm still littered the roots of the hedge. The two of them stood there huddled against the cold.
“No one’s bothered you for a long time about Fiore, right?” Schliester asked.
“Is that what this is about?” Jimmy asked.
“We haven’t bothered you. The city side hasn’t been bothering you, have they?” Schliester said.
He sounded weird, like someone who looks at things a little cockeyed and can’t get to the point. So Jimmy figured he’d better keep it as simple as possible. “No,” he said, “no one’s bothered me.”
“What about you?”
“Me?”
“Are you sleeping all right?” Schliester asked.
Jimmy felt like spitting at him. “Get the fuck away from me,” he said, and started to walk away.
Schliester caught his arm, spun him around, and stepped right up to him.
“You set him up, Jimmy,” he said. “You knew him since you were kids and you set him up. I’m not going away. I don’t want you to talk to me now because you wouldn’t tell me enough. Someday you’re going to get tired of being reminded how you set him up and you’re going to tell me everything.”
He left Jimmy at the railing and walked back to his car.
That night, in a bar on Sullivan Street, Schliester tried to talk Gogarty into staying with him on the Blaine case. He reminded his partner that the whole thing started when a random surveillance of Chet Fiore led them to a midtown restaurant. Maybe if they kept an eye on Jeffrey Blaine, they’d get lucky again.
“You call that lucky?” Gogarty said. “That’s like a doctor discovering a new fucking disease by catching it.”
Jeffrey got used to seeing Wally Schliester out his window or in his rearview mirror. Maybe once a week, maybe twice. No pattern to it. Day, night, skip a day, skip a week, and then he would be there again. If it was supposed to make Jeffrey worry, it didn’t; if it was supposed to be an annoyance, it wasn’t.
Schliester was there the night Jeffrey got a call from a police lieutenant in New Haven. “We found your daughter wandering the streets, Mr. Blaine,” the lieutenant said. “She wasn’t very coherent.”
Jessica had been clean for almost a year when she went back to Yale. This relapse caught Jeffrey completely unprepared.
He called the garage and asked them to bring up his car. It was waiting for him when he got there. He wanted to tell that goddamn cop or agent or whatever he called himself to get the hell out of his life, that he had no business making himself obnoxious at a time like this. But he wasn’t about to give the man the satisfaction.
The bastard’s headlights were in Jeffrey’s mirror all the way to New Haven.
The lieutenant told Jeffrey that Jessica had been sent on to the hospital. Her breathing was irregular and they didn’t want to take chances.
“I appreciate that,” Jeffrey said.
The hospital was just down the street from the police station. The lieutenant personally came out to the sidewalk and pointed the way.
As Jeffrey drove off, he saw Schliester get out of his car to talk to the lieutenant. The man was a hyena, Jeffrey thought. Feeding on carrion.
Jessica was asleep when Jeffrey found her. The nurse said her vital signs were stable. He pulled up a chair and sat by his daughter’s bed to wait. When she finally opened her eyes, a wan smile passed across her lips as fleeting as the smile of an infant. “Daddy,” she said, in a very small voice.
“It’s all right, baby, it’s all right,” Jeffrey said. “I’ll take you home. You can come home with me.”
“Daddy,” she said again.
Jeffrey Blaine literally did not know how much money he made working for Gaetano Falcone. He kept it warehoused in so many different accounts in so many different countries that it would have been a vast undertaking just to keep count of it. And he certainly didn’t want records lying about. He bought a racehorse in England, and a villa and a boat in Italy. He bought the farmhouse in Normandy where he and Phyllis spent a few weeks just before Jessica was born, paying the farmer’s widow a monthly stipend as part of the purchase price. It made him feel good to know she would keep the place ready for his arrival if he ever got around to going there.
He personally underwrote, on an anonymous basis, the Didier Fund, which was in danger of falling apart from a lack of subscribers. They did leukemia research. It was worth a shot.
He took Jessica to Normandy for a month and a half. It was good for her, and when they got back he found it possible to be hopeful about her future again.
Schliester still came around now and then, still watching and waiting.
Sooner or later, Schliester knew, Jeffrey Blaine would make a mistake. Sooner or later, Jimmy Angelisi would crack open like a seed pod.
Wally Schliester wasn’t going anywhere. He had all the time in the world.
Acknowledgments
I must begin with an expression of my gratitude to and for my wife Charlotte and my son Matt. There were so many times since I started this book when I needed them so much. Whenever I turned to them, whenever I reached out to them, they were reaching out to me. I am a very lucky man.
And to my brother Stuart, deepest thanks for all his encouraging words and helpful suggestions.
I owe a considerable debt to Dan Conaway, my editor at HarperCollins, for his patience, for the soundness and the sensitivity of his suggestions, and for the dogged vigor with which they were made. In short, for making this book so much better than it would otherwise have been.
My deepest gratitude to my friend and agent Nick Ellison, who was there from the very start (and before, in fact); who knows how true it is, for once, that without him this book wouldn’t exist.
I don’t even know how to begin to thank my son Mark. Yes, of course for his sensitive reading of the manuscript and his invaluable suggestions. At my age—and at his—he gave me writing lessons. Which shouldn’t have come as a surprise. And didn’t. But more than that, a father’s thanks for his being there at the top of the stairs and showing me the way down. I don’t have words to tell him how much that meant and means. I hope he knows.
About the Author
The author of Tygers of Wrath, PHILIP ROSENBERG’s other books include the bestsellers Badge of the Assassin (with Robert K. Tanenbaum) and Point Blank (with Sonny Grosso). His numerous screenwriting credits include his adaptation of Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods and the sequel to To Sir With Love, starring Sidney Poitier. Mr. Rosenberg lives in Danbury, Connecticut.
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Praise
How far is too far…?
PHILIP ROSENBERG
HOUSE
OF LORDS
“A ferociously well-written exploration of the seductions of power.”
Nelson DeMille
“Complex…compelling…a penetrating and engrossing novel about the world of high finance.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A fat, juicy thriller…[that] breathlessly mixes Mafiosi, billionaires, sex, and drugs in an edgy combo.”
USA Today
“A well-written page-turner with fascinating characters and surprising twists.”
Sidney Sheldon
“An old-fashioned morality tale [that] tells you what happens when an upright man dips his toe into evil…The Godfather meets Bonfire of the Vanities…If you liked either book—and surely you like one of them—you’ll want to see what happens when they meet in HOUSE OF LORDS…You’ll be reluctant to set it aside.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Also by Philip Rosenberg
THE SEVENTH HERO: THOMAS CARLYLE AND THE
THEORY OF RADICAL ACTIVISM
CONTRACT ON CHERRY STREET
POINTBLANK
TYGERS OF WRATH
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
HOUSE OF LORDS. Copyright © 2007 by Philip Rosenberg. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2007 ISBN: 9780061857195
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