by Alice Orr
She’d taken a seat on a long, off-white sofa upholstered in fabric with a pattern of small flowers. Vic couldn’t imagine his father picking out furniture, or anything else, with flowers on it. His mother patted the cushion next to her and smiled up at him. She’d always been beautiful, and in the bright daylight of this room he could see that she was beautiful still. She probably colored her hair to cover up the gray, but she never would have talked about such a thing. Her skin was as smooth as it had ever been, and she didn’t wear much makeup. She was dressed as he always remembered her, in simple, well-made clothes that came from the best stores, but were never flashy or deliberately expensivelooking. It had occurred to him many times that she was way too elegant to be called “Ma,” but she seemed to love him doing it all the same.
“Sit with me,” she repeated.
“I don’t know…” he began.
“Sit.”
Vic shrugged once again and sat down on the long sofa.
“Now, what is it you need your father to do for you?”
“Ma, I think that’s something I have to talk about with him, not you.”
“Why is that?”
Her eyes were completely clear, as if she’d never had a secret or could never tell a lie. He’d felt that about Katherine’s eyes, too, though he hadn’t really known it till this minute.
“Why is it you don’t think you can talk about the same things with me that you could discuss with your father?”
“Ma, this is business.”
She laughed again. “You act as though you think this is some kind of Hollywood movie where the wife keeps herself deliberately ignorant of her husband’s professional involvements.”
Vic stared at his mother. He always had thought something just like that.
“I know you don’t approve of some of the people your father has associated himself with over the years,” she said. “Maybe I didn’t entirely approve myself, but I love your father and I support whatever he does or whatever he may have done.”
“Ma, he’s a…” He didn’t want to say the word.
“You think your father is a gangster.” She supplied the word for him. “He is not. He simply knows people who know things.”
He breathed a heavy sigh. This was why he didn’t come here. He was ashamed of what his father had done with his life, how he had made the money that bought this house, and the one in Colorado, and the one in Barbados. Vic was ashamed, and nobody else would even admit there was anything to be ashamed of. He made a move to stand up and leave, but his mother took his arm to stop him.
“I sense that you want to know things yourself now. Why don’t you tell me what they are, and I will speak to your father.”
Vic usually knew exactly what he had to do. He wasn’t so sure about that now.
“I would guess that your question must be of great importance to you,” his mother added. “Otherwise, you would not have come here.”
Once again, she had read him accurately. There was more at stake here than his differences with his family, even his feelings about his father. By the time the knock sounded at the double doors, he had told his mother most of the details of the situation with Coyote and his suspicion that professional criminals of the organized variety might be involved. He needed to find out specifically who those criminals might be and what they were up to. As his mother had said, his father knew people who knew things. If anybody could dig up the information Vic was so desperate to find out, that somebody was Gabriel Maltese.
“Come in,” Vic’s mother said in response to the knock.
Vic might have been disgusted by the palooka who came through the door and how typical he was of the kind of guy Vic’s father had to keep around him for protection, but Vic wasn’t thinking about that now. He was too startled by who the palooka had in tow.
“Katherine!” Vic exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
THAT WAS MORE QUESTION than Katherine was prepared to answer at the moment. Before she answered anything, she had some questions of her own.
“What are you doing here?” she said, not bothering to be polite about it, despite the presence of the very distinguished-looking woman sitting next to Vic.
“I used to live here,” he said.
“I suppose you must have had his job then.”
Katherine indicated the brawny groundskeeper, or whatever he was, who had escorted her in here.
“I was a little closer to the family than that,” Vic said in a slightly amused tone that made Katherine want to punch him right in the nose. “In fact, I’d like you to meet my mother.”
The woman on the long sofa stood up, as Vic had done when Katherine first came in.
Katherine smiled and said, “How do you do,” because she was too stunned to respond any other way than with the automatic courtesy she’d been taught from childhood on.
“Mother, this is Katherine Fairchild. We work together.”
Vic still sounded amused.
“I’m so pleased to meet you,” the elegant woman said with a radiant smile as she came around the sofa with her hand outstretched to greet Katherine. “Won’t you come in and sit down?”
Katherine was searching for signs of resemblance between the two faces in front of her. She supposed there could be a few, mostly around the mouth and in the way they were both smiling now, though Vic was wearing more what she’d call an irritating grin.
“Come, Miss Fairchild. Sit down,” Vic’s mother said again and took Katherine’s arm to lead her into the room.
When she moved to follow, her right leg smarted and she flinched from the pain.
“Are you all right, my dear?” Vic’s mother asked sounding truly concerned. “Are you hurt?”
“She was trying to climb over the back wall and she skinned her knee,” Katherine’s brawny escort explained.
Vic’s mother gazed down at Katherine’s torn stocking and the bloody scrape underneath, then looked up with a confused expression. Katherine was feeling the same, and embarrassed as well. She couldn’t help being grateful when Vic stepped forward to what she hoped would be her rescue.
“I told Katherine about the gardens at the back of the house, Mother,” he said. “She couldn’t wait to see for herself.”
Katherine smiled in what she meant to look like agreement.
“If you’ll excuse us for a moment,” he went on before she could babble some kind of response about her alleged interest in the gardens, “I’m going to take a look at her injuries.”
“Yes, you must do that,” his mother said. “I’ll send in a pair of stockings to replace those torn ones. The downstairs bathroom is beyond the staircase.”
“I remember how to get around this place,” Vic said with an edge in his voice that made Katherine all the more curious about what might be going on here.
However, after he had supported her by the arm while she hobbled across the marble floor of the foyer of this very grand house and they were out of earshot inside the equally grand bathroom, he was the one to begin the questioning.
“How did you get here?” he asked.
“I followed you.”
“You trailed me all the way from the center?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
He’d seated her on a chair in front of a dressing table with three mirrors, each offering a separate view of her flushed face.
“I wanted to find out more about you,” she said.
He laughed. “Well, I guess you’re doing that. Aren’t you?”
She didn’t know what to say. The mirrors had already told her she looked as bewildered as she was feeling.
“I’ll bet this place comes as a real shock to you,” he said. “Not what you expected from me. Right?”
“Right.”
She knew it might be more diplomatic to tell less than the whole truth, but she didn’t feel like being diplomatic just now.
“You probably had me pegged as coming from the wrong side of the tracks.”
Katherine only sighed in response to that one. Then, she gasped. Vic had lifted the leg she’d hit against the stone wall onto his lap as he knelt on the floor in front of her. His touch seared through the thin material of her torn stocking. That was what caused her to gasp. Fortunately, the sound was covered by his next remark.
“I see you have these silly boots on again,” he said.
She felt the blush begin in her already red cheeks. He’d reminded her of why she’d dressed this way that morning, because she wanted to look sexy for him. Now, all of that and her foot in his lap struck her as very out of place. She pulled her leg away.
“I have to leave now,” she said, standing up and doing her best to ignore the sting in her scraped leg.
Vic stood up next to her.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
He backed against the door as she was moving toward it.
“You came all the way here to find out more about me. That’s what you just said. Right?”
“That’s right. Now, I wish I hadn’t done that.”
“I think it was a good idea,” he said.
Something had changed in his voice, softened in a way that made her stop trying to get past him to the door, at least for the moment.
“Why do you think that?”
“I want to tell you about myself. You deserve to know the truth.”
Katherine suspected she should resist the temptation to agree with him. She wished she was that strong.
“We’ll talk on the way back to town,” he said, reaching behind him to open the door. “We can take my car.”
“But I drove here,” she said.
“Gus will bring your car to my place.”
“Gus?”
“The guy who caught you climbing the wall.”
Vic had opened the door. He took Katherine’s arm to lead her out into the foyer, but she stood her ground.
“If this Gus drives my car into town, how will he get back here?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about that,” Vic said. “Guys like Gus are very resourceful.”
And what about guys like you? She would have liked to ask, but the maid had arrived with a pair of new stockings, still in their package.
“Why don’t we take these with us,” he said, relieving the maid of the package. “We’ll say our goodbyes now.”
Despite her questions and misgivings, Katherine followed Vic toward the living room to take their deceptively polite leave of this bewildering place. She was too eager to hear Vic’s story to do otherwise.
Chapter Twenty
What Vic hadn’t understood till this very minute was one of the reasons he’d never told this story to anyone. He didn’t really know how. He’d wanted to grab Katherine in his arms and kiss her when they were alone in his parents’ mansion. He didn’t follow through on his instincts, and not because he was afraid she would push him away. She might do that, but he’d try again till she melted against him and returned his kiss with the passion he knew well from last night. He hadn’t put his arms around her because he was holding himself back from that closeness, the closeness that would bring him to this minute, when he’d have to tell his story.
The time had come anyway. Maybe it was bound to happen. Maybe all these years of being alone, at least as an adult, had been about knowing this minute would come and putting it off as long as he could. So, why stop putting it off now? Katherine was the answer to that one. He cared about her more than he cared about keeping himself safe from hard-to-handle feelings. He cared about her, and he didn’t want to lose her and go back to being alone again. He gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles went white. When he began to talk, his voice was husky with emotion.
“We didn’t always live in that house,” he said, not sure why he’d chosen to lead off with this statement. He could feel Katherine’s quiet attention as he talked. “We were in Troy till I was almost twelve.”
He took the turn off Crumitie onto Route 9 more slowly than was usual for him.
“I was told later that my father got out of the businesses he was into when we left Troy.”
“What businesses were those?” she asked softly.
“Not-so-legal businesses,” he said.
Vic saw her nod out of the corner of his eye as he kept his gaze deliberately on the road ahead.
“After Troy, my father supposedly went strictly legit, as the saying goes. Mostly, investing and real estate. He did very well, as you can see from the way they live, but what got him his start was the money he made in the rackets.”
“What kind of rackets?”
“Gambling, for the most part,” he said. “That’s what I was told anyway when I got old enough to put two and two together, around eleven or so. Hints of things I didn’t really want to believe. By the time I was sixteen, I had a pretty clear idea what was going on.”
“You said your father had…” Katherine hesitated. He could imagine how hard she was trying to pick just the right words. “You said he’d changed his line of work by then,” she began again. “What made you think he’d been doing something illegal before that?”
“He still had a lot of the same friends. They’d come around the new house, especially at this time of year. My mother puts on a big Christmas Eve party every year. It would be wall-to-wall mobster city in there. Even a kid like me could figure that out, especially with the way they had their palookas lined up outside the house supposedly to guard the limos but really to keep an eye out for cops or reporters.”
“Are you sure that’s what was going on? Maybe they were only wealthy businessmen with bodyguards.”
Vic glanced out the side window. They were driving past some very expensive real estate right now, high-class houses lived in by high-class people. He could understand why Katherine might have a hard time putting this kind of neighborhood together with the idea of career criminals. What he was saying had to come across to her as way too far-fetched to be true.
He shrugged as he turned his attention back to the road in front of them. “I know what those guys were about no matter how crazy it may sound,” he said. “They were hoods in high-priced suits, nothing more, nothing less.”
“How can you be so certain of that?”
He could tell she was trying to help him out, doing her level best to give him a way off the hook. Her caring and concern for him struck him in a place very close to his heart.
“I know you want to make all of this easier on me,” he said, “and that’s very nice of you. But, the truth is, I can be sure I’m right about my father because he proved to me that I was.”
“How did he do that?”
“By what he didn’t say the day I confronted him with what I suspected about his history.”
Vic had stopped taking advantage a long time ago of opportunities to crawl off the hook of the truth about his family. Still, he would have preferred to find at least a little of the escape artist in himself right now. The thought of this classy woman hearing the real scoop about the downand-dirty background he came from was almost more than he could stand.
“What was it that your father didn’t say to you?” she asked.
He sighed. “First of all, he didn’t say I was wrong about the things I was accusing him of. He also didn’t say I was right. That’s my dad straight down to the ground. Don’t explain, don’t complain. He used to say that a lot. He has some very strong principles…for a crook.”
He could hear the bitterness in his voice, and how fresh that bitterness sounded, even after all these years.
“Was your father ever convicted of any of these crimes you suspect him of committing?”
“Not convicted. In fact, he was never even formally charged. He had big-time connections in high places all over Rensselaer County. The cops didn’t dare lean on him too hard. Still, they had their eye on him. They’d have loved to catch him at something, I’m sure, but he was too smart to get caught. That’s also my dad str
aight down to the ground. He’s a smart guy through and through, and he knows how to take care of business.”
That was why Vic had gone to Loudonville today, though he didn’t like admitting it even to himself. Today he needed the help of somebody who could take care of business.
“Do you know these things for absolute fact?”
“I found out for an absolute fact when I got a little older and was stupid enough to start asking around about joining the police force myself. Lucky for me, I guess, a cop I knew clued me in before I could make a total fool of myself by actually putting in an application to the police academy. He told me that, as long as I had the last name Maltese, I had about a snowball’s chance in hell of getting into a station house for anything except maybe to stand in a lineup.”
“Maybe you should have put in that application anyway. That policeman friend of yours could have been wrong.”
Vic kept his eyes trained on the road ahead. The last thing he needed right now was to look over and see the sympathy on Katherine’s face. He was having a hard enough time listening to it in her voice.
“I’m better off where I ended up. Working at the center, I mean,” he said. “I don’t have to be proving myself to everybody all the time.”
“Except maybe to yourself.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked as they headed onto North Pearl Street.
“Because I can hear you doing it right now. I can hear you being ashamed, as if you were the one who did something you should be punished for. I think you ought to let up on yourself a little.”
“The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. Or maybe it’s the acorn. Isn’t that what they always say?”
“They say a lot of things. More often than not, they aren’t worth listening to. I say you are a good man.”
Vic had pulled up at the stop sign where North Pearl Street meets Livingston Avenue. They were back in the city of Albany now, only a few blocks from the Arbor Hill Center. Maybe that was why he’d suddenly become aware of the tightness of his throat and of his fingers on the steering wheel. He was back in his own territory. Loudonville might be only a few miles down the road, but it was really a universe away as far as Vic was concerned.