Bloodline: A Novel

by Warren Murphy

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” Sofia said, because she felt she should say something.

  “I’m not. He was a bastard.”

  “I hated him,” Sofia said.

  “Not as much as I did. I hated him before you were born.”

  “It’s a nice grave anyway.”

  “Better than he deserves. If it wasn’t for Father Mario, I would have just thrown him out in the street and let the garbagemen cart him away like a dead horse.”

  They were silent again for long minutes, still staring at the grave.

  Sofia said, “Most of these graves have flowers. Maybe we should have brought something.”

  “I did bring something for his grave,” Mrs. Mangini said. She hocked and spat. “Now you.”

  Sofia spat, too.

  “Hell’s too good for you, you son of a bitch. Good-bye and good riddance,” her mother said.

  “Come on, Mama, I’ll take you home.” She smiled. “So we can grieve.”

  “Anisette. A little anisette will make the grieving go better.”

  Sofia got home late in the afternoon, and the telephone rang almost immediately.

  A male voice asked for Nilo. When she said he was not home, the man said, “This is his friend, Harry. Do you know where he is?”

  “I think he’s out of town today.”

  “Give him a message. Tell him I called and said that the cops fished some truck driver out of the river.”

  Sofia thought quickly, then said, “Harry, I think you ought to come up here and talk to me.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  * * *

  TOMMY HAD BEEN IN HIS POLICE OFFICE when the report came that the body found on a straggly piece of beach across the river in Jersey City had been identified as Eddie Cole. The truck driver had been shot in the head.

  The detective Tommy had assigned to the case had not been able to find out where Cole had gone when he left the speakeasy where he had been drinking with Tommy. “Look again,” Tommy told him. “Somebody had to see something. Get a picture of Cole. Hang out on the street late at night. See if anybody wanders by and show them the picture. Somebody saw something.”

  He himself could place Cole in the speakeasy with Harry Birchevsky. He had overheard the men arguing and heard Cole threaten to go to Lev Mishkin. But when Tommy left the bar, Cole was still there, still alive. He needed one more piece of evidence to grab Birchevsky for Cole’s murder. And if I get Birchevsky, he will give up Nilo.

  * * *

  SOFIA SENT THE NURSE OUTSIDE with the children. When the doorman buzzed her, she answered, then stood by the door and straightened her hair. She unbuttoned her blouse just one button more than modesty allowed and looked in the mirror behind the flower-filled lavabo. If she leaned forward just so …

  She was satisfied and opened the door.

  “Hello, Harry,” she said.

  She leaned forward as if to pluck a piece of lint from her skirt, careful to keep her eyes modestly averted. When she looked up, Harry was staring at her bosom.

  “You’re looking beautiful,” he said. “Nilo’s very lucky.”

  “Come on in. Nilo’s told me about this problem with the driver, but sometimes I don’t think he’s hard enough to deal with it.” She shut the door behind him. “I think it’s important for a man to be hard sometimes, don’t you?”

  * * *

  TOMMY FALCONE ROLLED OVER in his sleep and reached out for his wife. She was gone. A flash of panic struck through him and he came instantly awake. The illuminated clock dial read 3:00 A.M.

  He got up from bed and went out to find Rachel sitting on the sofa, sipping tea, staring at a partially finished painting on an easel.

  “Can’t sleep?” Tommy asked.

  “Something like that,” she said with a smile. “You know, I’ve been thinking.”

  “Oh, God, not that again,” Tommy said with a mock groan as he sat next to her.

  “Quiet, paisan. I’ve been thinking that I’m a terrible painter. Look at this thing.” She gestured toward the oil painting, the face of a woman so hideously distorted that it looked as if the woman had been made of wax and was melting.

  “I like it. It has a style all its own,” Tommy said.

  “You hate it. I see you grimace every time you walk past it.”

  “That obvious, huh?”

  “I read you like a book, buddy. Anyway, I’m going to put the paints away and get a job.”

  “What kind of a job?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I might become a streetwalker out by the docks in Brooklyn. I don’t know what kind of a job, you nitwit. Some kind of job.”

  “I don’t want you being a waitress or anything like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want people yelling at you. And anyway, you’re always spilling things. You’d be a terrible waitress.”

  “Well, just for your information, Jewish girls don’t become waitresses. We start at the top. Sewing clothes in an attic or something.”

  “You can’t sew, either,” Tommy said.

  “Stop being so literal. That’s just an example.”

  “I’ve got it. You can be my sex slave.”

  Rachel turned toward him and murmured, “Now we’re getting somewhere.” She kissed him hard and Tommy wrapped his arms around her before Rachel pulled away, stood, and led him back to bed.

  “I’ll be glad when you’re usable again,” he said.

  “No more than me.”

  She turned on her side, and Tommy thought he could hear her breathing take on the rhythms of sleep. He began to doze off.

  “Tommy,” she said suddenly. “I can’t sleep.”

  “Try harder.”

  “I was wondering if you’d be interested in a bit of sexual perversity,” she said.

  “Anything’s better than thinking of you trying to be a waitress.”

  She punched him playfully in the arm, then slipped her head under the covers. Afterward, they lay together in each other’s arms.

  “I kind of liked that,” she said.

  “I’m not sure if I did,” Tommy said. “You’ll have to do it a couple thousand more times before I’ll be able to make up my mind.”

  She laughed and they fell asleep.

  He was never certain what happened next. He was awake for only an instant. He thought he caught sight of a male figure in the dark bedroom, and then he saw flashing light as something clubbed him on the side of the head.

  Every time he struggled back toward consciousness he was hit again. He heard Rachel cry once and then her cries were muffled. He tried to yell, but there was something across his mouth. He felt a needle sting his arm and he went into a deep sleep. Later, he felt the needle sting again. And then he felt nothing.

  * * *

  ALL THE HOLIDAY SERVICES and the New Year’s celebrations and his extra duties as assistant pastor had taken a lot out of Mario, and when his mother had seen him after Mass on Sunday, she had told him he looked like an Irisher and ordered him to come for dinner.

  Now he sat at the kitchen table reading the paper while his mother fussed at the stove. “Look at the time,” she said. “It’s nearly six thirty. Tommy and Rachel were supposed to be here an hour ago. Dinner will be ruined.”

  “Your dinner is never ruined, Mama.”

  “It’s just not like them not to call if they’re going to be late.”

  Mario laughed. “You worry too much.”

  “For this wisdom, we sent you to seminary?”

  The telephone rang.

  “See?” called Tony, who was buried behind a cloud of smoke in the living room, reading the sports pages. Since he had retired, he was now permitted to smoke inside the house, especially since he often seemed to be in a dark, self-pitying mood and sometimes did not leave his seat on the sofa for hours on end. “That’s them calling now. I bet they just forgot the time.”

  Anna answered the kitchen phone and when she hung up turned to Mario with a
worried look.

  “It was Tommy’s office. They were wondering if he was here.”

  Mario nodded and rose. “Well, nothing to worry about, Mama. I think while we’re waiting, I’ll take a little walk before dinner.”

  “I think I’ll join you,” Tony said. He vanished into the bedroom, and when he came back, Mario saw his police revolver under his jacket.

  “We’ll be right back, Anna,” Tony said.

  * * *

  MARIO POUNDED ON THE DOOR for a full thirty seconds, but no one answered, and finally Tony shoved him aside and slammed the heel of his shoe into the door below the knob. The door quivered and swung open.

  Tommy was standing by the window in his pajamas looking out into the street. He did not even turn when his father and brother broke in.

  “Tommy,” Mario called, and ran to his side.

  His brother did not move. He simply stared forward.

  “It’s all right, Tommy. We’re here now,” Mario said. He moved alongside so he could see his brother’s eyes. He had seen them like that before, thirteen years before, in that hospital in France.

  Tony walked through the open bedroom door. Mario heard him groan, and even as he held Tommy, he turned toward the bedroom.

  His father had tears in his eyes. He walked leadenly toward Mario. “She’s dead,” he whispered. “Rachel.”

  “Rachel’s dead,” Tommy echoed in a hollow voice.

  “Help your son,” Mario told Tony.

  “You don’t want to go in there,” Tony said.

  “I have to.”

  Rachel was lying naked in bed. Her face had turned ash-dark and her tongue was sticking out like a lizard’s. Her lips were drawn back in a corpse’s rictal grin.

  Mario pulled the bloody cover up over her and knelt at the bedside. He did not have his oils for the formal saying of the extreme unction sacrament, but he blessed her without it. He was not sure if she would have wanted it, but unbeknownst to Tommy or her father, she had talked to him and Tina often in the past few weeks about converting to Catholicism. The sacrament would do her soul no harm, he thought.

  As he prayed, the tears coursed down his face.

  * * *

  A YOUNG PRIEST WAS CALLED in to take over Mario’s parish duties so he could attend to his family, but still those winter weeks early in 1930 were nothing but a blur.

  Tony had gone to tell Lev Mishkin of the tragedy, but Mishkin could not be found. As day passed into day, he was not seen or heard from. In the absence of any known relatives, Mario took over responsibility for Rachel’s burial, and he shared with a rabbi the prayers at her grave.

  Tommy was not at the funeral. Detoxification had been the easiest part. His body had been shot up with enough morphine to kill him, but much of it did not enter his bloodstream, and it was not over a long-enough period to addict him again.

  But he had simply lost his mind. He lay in St. Vincent’s Hospital, motionless, wordless, oblivious. The family kept up a vigil at his bedside, taking turns, talking to him during all his waking hours, but they might just as well not have been there. Tommy responded to no stimulus; he merely stared at the ceiling.

  Even though they found it distasteful, the police’s murder investigation centered on Tommy for a few days, under the theory that he had made himself crazy with drugs and then killed his wife. But the physical evidence soon made it clear that Tommy had been a victim, too. The morphine had been injected in places Tommy could not have reached himself; there were signs that Rachel’s and Tommy’s mouths had been silenced with tape. Tommy’s head wounds, clearly not self-inflicted, were more evidence of unknown assailants, as was the sheer brutality of the vicious sexual attack on Rachel.

  Sofia was not at the funeral, but Nilo came with Tina and stood with the Falcone family.

  Later, he told Mario, “I don’t know who did this, but I’m going to find out. When I do, they are dead men.”

  * * *

  DESPITE A CONSTANT STRING of needling newspaper stories from John F. X. Kinnair, after a few weeks the police gave up on the investigation. Lev Mishkin was still missing, and the detectives handling the case believed that perhaps he had been involved in Rachel’s murder. But on March 18, with the first glimmering of spring, Mishkin’s body was found in a landfill dumping ground near Yonkers. He had been shot six times at close range and had been dead for several months. The police went through the motions, then added Mishkin’s murder to that of his daughter in the unsolved file.

  No one seemed to care, particularly Tommy Falcone, who was back at the convent of the Sisters of Quietude in Monticello, New York, ninety miles north of the city. He had been placed on leave of absence by the police department, and Mario had pulled some strings to get him admitted to the small convent hospital soon after Rachel’s murder, just in case his life was in danger.

  Tommy lay in bed like a vegetable, able to talk but not wanting to, able to move but not caring to. One of the doctors who treated the nuns at the convent told Tony that his son had suffered a great emotional trauma.

  “When’s he going to come out of it?” Tony asked on one of his visits.

  “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry. There’s just too much that we don’t know. He’s in the right place. Prayers can help him as much as medicine.”

  We don’t need prayers, Tony thought. Mario has enough prayers for all of us. We need a doctor who knows something.

  The first time Tony had visited him, he had looked in on his son, then gone out into the hallway to weep. The life force had gone out of Tommy and he did not respond to questions or conversation.

  When Tony got back to the city, he decided his retirement was over. Since putting in his papers, he had spent day after day sitting on his sofa, reading the newspaper, but now he was out of the house at dawn, often returning home only late at night. The police might give up on the investigation, but Tony vowed that he never would.

  He went to see Captain Cochran and asked what Tommy had been working on that might have triggered mob retribution.

  “If I tell you, you’re going to start looking into things,” Cochran said.

  “Captain, even if you don’t tell me, I’m going to start looking.”

  Finally, Cochran told him that Tommy had been particularly interested in the apparent murder of a garment district truck driver named Eddie Cole and in a man named Harry Birchevsky, who had worked for Mishkin’s union.

  It was a starting place. Using his old gold badge for identification, Tony interviewed everyone who lived in Tommy’s apartment building several times over. Everybody who lived on the same block was grilled, as were deliverymen, mailmen, milkmen, cabdrivers—anyone who might have been on the street during the time of Rachel’s killing and who might have seen something, anything. All Tony got was two reports from people who had seen a stranger in the neighborhood, a husky, disheveled man they could not identify but who walked duckfooted.

  With Lev Mishkin missing, his union was in a total state of confusion, but Tony was able to find out that Birchevsky was a husky, disheveled man who walked duckfooted. Tony knew that Lepke Buchalter, who was allied with Luciano, had been making inroads into the garment makers’ union. Had Luciano been behind Rachel’s killing? As far as he knew, Luciano had nothing against Tommy, but was it some kind of convoluted scheme to get at Tony, for Luciano to pay him back for the late-night ride that left the gangster scarred and bleeding on a Staten Island beach?

  Would I have been better off killing the bastard, like O’Shaughnessy wanted to? Tony wondered.

  But he could not make himself buy that scenario. Even allowing for his belief that Luciano was the lowest form of scum, he did not believe the gang leader would have approved the brutal murder of a policeman’s wife.

  There was also the question of Tommy being shot up with morphine. It was clearly an attempt to pin Rachel’s killing on him, but who would have known about Tommy’s wartime morphine addiction?

  Finally, it was Tim O�
��Shaughnessy who gave him the tip. Tony met with his old partner one day for lunch, and O’Shaughnessy remembered telling Tommy that Harry Birchevsky and Nilo had been in Dannemora together.

  Tony went back to the union and started hanging out in the small speakeasies near union headquarters, and after one long evening of too many beers, he heard from one of the drivers about the day that Lev had ordered Nilo Sesta and Harry Birchevsky thrown out of his office and down the stairs.

  That same night, Tony showed up at Nilo’s apartment and rapped on the door. Nilo answered and said, in surprise, “Uncle Tony.”

  “Don’t ‘Uncle’ me, you thug. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  He brushed by Nilo into the apartment and stood in the center of the living room floor.

  “All right, then talk,” Nilo said, turning back from the door.

  Tony heard a sound behind him and saw Sofia coming out of one of the bedrooms, which was probably the nursery for their two children.

  “Hello, Uncle Tony,” she said.

  “I’ve got to talk to your husband,” Tony said.

  Sofia shook her head. “We have no secrets.”

  “Whatever you want. Nilo, Lev Mishkin threw you and his own organizer out of his office. What was that about?”

  “Union business. How does it concern you?”

  “Because Tommy was there and his wife’s been killed. Because Mishkin is missing. Because, dammit, I want to know why.” He held his hands, balled into fists, tightly at his sides, trying to hold his temper in check.

  “Harry Birchevsky,” Nilo said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Harry and I were trying to organize the garment drivers. Mishkin didn’t like it.”

  “Let me get this straight. This Birchevsky was Mishkin’s organizer, but he was working with you against Mishkin?”

  “He liked me better,” Nilo said with a grin.

  “I doubt that,” Tony said. “Where do I find this Birchevsky?”

  “I don’t know,” Nilo said. “When Mishkin found out what we were doing, that was the end of our scheme. I haven’t talked to him since then.”

  “You don’t know where he lives?”

  Nilo shook his head. “We were never close.”

  Sofia said, “If you’re thinking that Harry had something to do with Tommy’s poor wife…” She shook her head. “Harry wouldn’t do anything like that. He’s not that kind of man.”