by Norman Green
“I don’t think it’s pride, Gro.”
“Call it whatever you want, Al, but I think I know you, at least a little bit. You ain’t after being scared off. Al, I want you to walk away from this thing with a whole skin.”
“Yeah, that’s kinda what I want, too. Don’t worry about me, Gro, I’m not gonna go on a crusade. There’s just a few more things I need to check out, and if they come up blank, I’ve done all I can do. I can walk away with a clear conscience.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Gotta leave on your own terms.” She thought she could hear sorrow in his voice.
“Something like that.”
“I wish you’d listen to me, Al.”
“All the boys tell me that.”
He snorted. “I can believe that. Keep your head down, Martillo. Will you promise me that much?”
“I’ll be careful.”
“I suppose I’ll have to settle for that. When this is all over . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Can we meet for coffee, you and me? It was all business, that first time, and then the last time I was hungover out of me skull. Maybe the next time I can say what I need to say.”
Al remembered standing on Caughlan’s second-floor walkway, next to Helen Caughlan, remembered seeing O’Hagan look up at her, remembered seeing his somber face light up when he saw her. “That would be nice, Gro. I’ll call you.”
It was about a half hour later when her brain started to work. He never mentioned the dope coming through Caughlan’s operation, she thought. And he said he heard about you from Caughlan. Didn’t Caughlan say he heard from O’Hagan? But then again, maybe it didn’t mean anything. Rumors come and go, who knows where they start.
“I don’t believe it.” Rachael hovered over her, prodding, peering, listening with her stethoscope. There was more tension between them this time around. Alessandra could feel it. Maybe it was because she was less desperate than before, more resistant. Rachael had been a savior before, an angel of mercy. Now she was an authority figure.
“You don’t believe what?” Unclench your fists, Alessandra told herself. Relax. Take it easy, she’s on your side. Anger is your biggest weakness.
But sometimes it was all she had.
The doctor glanced up from what she was doing, looked into Alessandra’s eyes. “Nobody heals this fast. It isn’t right.” Al thought she could see some resentment in Rachael’s eyes. “You didn’t stay in bed like I told you to. I was going to tell you that you could get up and get a little exercise, but I’m a bit late. Correct? You haven’t been resting.”
“I know my body.” I can’t lie in this bed all day, she thought. I’ll go out of my mind. “I know when it’s time for me to get up and get moving.”
“Sure you do.”
“Really,” Al said. “I’m fine. Besides, I have been taking it easy. I’ve been resting a lot. For me, anyhow.” And I missed morning practice four days running, she thought. Isn’t that enough?
Rachael reached up and brushed the hair out of Al’s face with her fingertips. “Your bruises are almost gone,” she said. “Your face looks much better than before.”
“Thanks.”
“Have you given any more thought to what I suggested? It’s not too late, you know.”
“Not too late for what?”
Rachael grimaced. “Are you kidding? It’s not too late to go to the police. I can testify . . .”
Alessandra shook her head. “Come on, you know exactly what’s going to happen if we go to the police. They’ll take one look at me and think, ‘Hysterical Puerto Rican broad, boyfriend probably caught her jumping the fence and smacked her around, now she wants to get back at him.’ They’ll never take me seriously. They’ll sit me down with a caring and sensitive lady officer from the cotton pony squad, and she’ll make a great show of investigating. She’ll make it look good, which is supposed to make me feel better, and everybody goes home happy.”
Rachael took her hand. “Alessandra, the men who did this to you really should face some sort of . . . Al, you’re hurting my hand.”
Alessandra released her grip. “Sorry.”
“Surely the police—”
“Rachael, the guys who did this are gonna get theirs, but first I need to know how soon I can get out of here.”
“You’re asking me? Does that mean you’ll do what I tell you to do?”
“No,” Al told her. “But it means I’ll think about it.”
“Fair enough.” Rachael kneaded Alessandra’s rib cage, feeling for the places where she had been kicked. “How much discomfort in here?”
“Not a lot. It’s still sore, but no sharp pangs anymore.”
Rachael looked disgusted. “There really should be a lot more pain. Well, I can’t say for sure without an X-ray, but I’d say your bones are healing. You can get out and around now. You’ll need to build your endurance back up gradually. You ought to avoid contact sports for about two more weeks. Can you do that?”
Alessandra thought about it. “Maybe,” she said. “I can do a week, I think, but after that, it all depends on how things shake out.”
“All right. Al, I misjudged you, I think. I really thought you were going to let these guys walk away from this. But you’re not, are you?”
Al shook her head. “Not a chance,” she said.
“You know, I gotta tell ya, sis, your taste in men sucks.” Elizabeth Walsh, TJ Conrad’s parole officer, was nothing like what Alessandra had pictured. She was a short, plump, middle-aged white lady with bumpy orange hair and a strong chin. They were sitting in her office, a small cluttered room in a musty government building in downtown Paterson, New Jersey.
“How do you figure that?” Al asked her.
“Oh, come on. You can’t be that naïve. TJ Conrad is a drug addict and an alcoholic. He is chronically unemployed, he’s a user, he’s a womanizer . . . For God’s sake,” she said. “He’s an irresponsible extended adolescent and he’s one of the most arrogant human beings I’ve ever met.”
Al decided to mess with her. “TJ is a gifted musician,” she said. “He’s an artist. You can’t expect an artist to live by the conventional rules. Transgression is part of his job description. An artist is supposed to—”
Walsh interrupted her. “Artist, my ass,” she snapped, and she jabbed a stubby finger in Al’s direction. “I got that son of a bitch an interview with a very successful musical group, they work just about year-round, believe me, these people are in demand. They need a piano player, Conrad plays the piano. And do you know what he told me? Hmmm? He told me when you’re the best guitar player on the continent, but you’re only an ordinary piano player, you can’t settle for ordinary. Even if they wanted a guitar player, he said, he couldn’t play with them, because musicians who play weddings all the time wind up playing everything like it was a wedding. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Can you tell me? I’ll tell you what it means, it means he’s lazy. I’ve got half a mind to fail his ass right back into the can.”
“Back into the can? You mean he’s been away?”
“Oh, no, I guess he forgot to tell you about that. Simple assault. Drunk and disorderly. Possession. Driving under the influence. Assault and battery. Resisting arrest. And so on, and so on.”
White lady, Al thought, probably lived in the ’burbs her whole life, never had the necessity to stand up to somebody. You ever have to fight for what’s yours, Al wanted to ask her, you ever have to drop your dignity in the street and fight off the rats who think they have the right to walk on you? She didn’t, though. It’s an argument she knew she could not win. No matter how soft they’ve had it, no matter how cush their lives have been, people always think they’ve had to walk through fire and broken glass to get where they are. Anyway, she told herself, you don’t know anything about this woman. What you’re feeling right now is prejudice. Maybe she’s had it just as hard as you. Maybe she’s as tough as she wants you to believe she is.
Yeah, okay.
Sure.
“Listen,” Al told her. “You might be right about TJ. He might be everything you say he is, but what he did the other night took guts. Things would have gone a lot worse for me if he hadn’t stepped in.”
“I never said he didn’t have guts.” Still, she didn’t look convinced. “So what, these two guys jump out of an alley, is that right? You were just walking down the street, minding your own business? Come on, no bullshit. You weren’t trying to cop for TJ? You gotta know, sis, anybody looks like you waltzes into some alley to cop is taking a hell of a risk. You sure you didn’t take a beating trying to score for this guy? Walk me through what happened.”
“TJ took me to the Met. We had driven back and—”
“The Met? The Metropolitan Museum? Oh, Christ, that’s priceless. I gotta give TJ his due, he never stops looking for the right angle.”
Al ignored that. “I had borrowed my uncle’s van. I park it in a lot nine or ten blocks from my apartment. TJ volunteered to drop me off, park it, and walk back. That’s how come he happened to be walking past the alley when he did. They had me in a bad spot. I thought . . .” You didn’t think, she told herself. But that was not part of the story she was going to tell this woman. “Anyway, I heard TJ yelling from the end of the alley. He said he had a camera phone, and that he had pictures of them. You know, the two guys who dragged me in there. They left me alone then, ran off chasing TJ.”
Elizabeth Walsh glanced at her watch. “All right,” she said. “I suppose even a creep like Conrad can do something right once in a while, although it’s hard for me to believe he’d stick his neck out unless there was something in it for him.” She thought for a minute. “Did he have a camera phone?”
“No.”
Walsh stared at her for a long count. “Listen, sweetheart, I’m gonna give you some advice. Dump this guy. You don’t owe him a thing. You got the looks, you got a job, you got an apartment, hell, you can do a lot better than a bum like TJ Conrad. He’s nothing but bad news.”
“What the hell happened to you?”
Alessandra was so surprised to see her father sitting in a darkened corner of Tio Bobby’s hospital room that her mind didn’t register his question. “What? What did you say?”
Victor Martillo rose up out of his chair and stalked across the room. He put a hand to her chin, turned her face into the light coming through the doorway behind her. “What happened?”
Al gritted her teeth. She was getting sick of the question. Besides, I’m not twelve years old anymore, she thought. It’s a little late for you to start worrying about me . . . She couldn’t say it. She took a breath, tried to calm herself, dampen the fire inside. “Walked when I should have run,” she said. “Nice to see you coming to see Tio Bobby after all.”
“This isn’t the first time I’ve been,” he said a bit defensively. She allowed him to turn her into the light so he could see her better. She wondered if he was angry at her for catching him committing an act of compassion, or if he was steamed because someone had gotten past the defenses he’d taught her. “Who did this?” His voice was getting loud. “Who did this to you?”
“I’m handling it,” she said. “Come back in and sit down. And quit yelling, you’re gonna get us kicked out of here.”
“You think this is yelling?” But he said it in a quieter tone, and he followed her back into Tio Bobby’s room and went over and sat back down in his chair. He turned the chair to face her, leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. “Tell me who hit you.”
“So you can go crazy on them? I told you, I’m handling it.”
He thought about that for a minute. “Believe it or not,” he said, “I still have some connections. Lots of retired military in the NYPD. I can do a lot more than fight. I can use the telephone as well as the next guy.”
She was still half angry, and she reproached herself for it. She resisted the impulse to confide in him, because she didn’t want him telling her what to do. You want him closer to you, she thought, but you don’t want him up in your face. Martillo, she told herself, you sure do lay a lot of conditions on people. Talk to the man.
“We got this client,” she said, and she started in.
After she finished, he sat quietly for a while.
I shouldn’t have told him anything, she thought. No good can come from this. I should have told him I got drunk and fell out of bed onto my face.
“You never met your grandmother,” he finally said.
“Which one?”
“My mother.”
“No. Mom had some pictures, but she never talked about your mother. Neither did you.”
“No,” he said. She waited for him to explain why not, knowing he never would. He sucked in a big breath of air, held it, blew it out. “You look a lot like her,” he said. “Sometimes when I catch you looking at me, for half a second I think you’re her, come back to torture me some more.”
“Torture you? You didn’t like her?”
“She was my mother,” he said, as though that should explain everything. “I loved her.” He patted his shirt pocket, feeling for his cigarettes. He’s not gonna light up in here, he’s just buying himself some time, Al thought. Her father left his butts where they were, hesitated a bit longer. “I’m not sure how to say this,” he finally said. “But you remind me of her a lot. She was the meanest woman I’ve ever known, and by a significant margin.”
“Oh, I see,” Al said, bristling. “And I suppose—”
He held a hand up to hold her off. “Easy, now,” he said. “Easy.” He looked over at Roberto, who lay silent and still in his hospital bed. Tio Bobby was no help. “She had the quickest hands I ever saw,” he said, looking into the darkness over Al’s head. “She was faster than any instructor I ever had, quicker than anybody I ever worked with, anybody I ever fought. She could smack you four times while you were trying to hit her once, and twice more before you hit the floor. And I don’t mean love taps, either. That woman could swat. But she didn’t always win, nobody does. She liked to drink, and sometimes she got knocked around. But it never kept her down. She might lay in bed for a day or so, but I always thought that was more from the hangover than anything else. Then she’d be back up and around like nothing happened. Normal person would still be in the hospital.” He looked down at her, held eye contact. “You were always like that, too, ever since you were a little kid. And you got your grandmother’s hands. But you got some of her temperament, too.”
“You think I’m a mean person?”
“No,” he said, hasty. “That’s not what I meant. Not really. But as much as I hated my mother growing up, I can’t judge her now. She lived in a different world. She did what she had to do to survive.” He sighed again. “I know you didn’t exactly have it easy, either. After your mother . . .”
Alessandra gave him a minute, then finished his sentence for him. “After she killed herself.”
“After she did what she did. I didn’t know what to do. I went back to work because I couldn’t think of anything better. And then, after you ran away from Mag’s house, those were the worst years of my life, because nobody knew what had happened to you. I thought it was my mother’s spirit, coming back a generation later to punish me.”
You ran out on me, you prick, you took that witch Magdelena’s side . . . “Why would she want to punish you?”
“I came to New York in ’seventy-two. I didn’t call home, or write or anything, I was just glad I got away. I thought she was probably happy to get rid of me.”
“What happened to her?”
“I’m getting to that.” He’d been sitting hunched over, his hands balled up into fists. He leaned back, held his hands out empty, palms up. “Nobody knows,” he said. “She just disappeared, like you did.”
“You never found out what became of her?”
“No,” he said. “She liked her liquor, and sometimes it took her places where she didn’t belong. And no matter . . . no matter how gifted you are, Alessandra, no matter how har
d you can hit, you can still be beaten. Nobody wins every time. Nobody.”
“You ever lose?”
“Why do you think the shore patrol always sends guys out in teams? You have a bad night, your partner picks you up. You’re out on your own and you have a bad night, it might be the end of the story.”
“I hear you,” she said, and then it was her turn to sit quiet for a while. “This was my fault,” she finally said. “I should have seen it coming, and maybe I did, but I didn’t want to see it. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“Will you let me help you?”
“Maybe,” she said. She wasn’t sure she trusted him enough to let him help her, even after all this time. And she couldn’t remember him ever talking this much before. She wondered how much more she would get out of him, if this was a real opening or just a momentary leak in the dam. “Who was your father?” He stared at her then, and she could feel the sadness coming in waves across the darkened room. He sounded very young when he answered her.
“When I was a boy she used to tell me he was a pirate,” he said. “She said he’d come back someday, but he never did.”
“You really have connections in the NYPD?”
“Yes,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “There’s somebody you can check out for me . . .”
Nineteen
Anthony watched Al pack. He remembered when he and Roberto had been young, how little they’d started out with. Never, though, could he remember being so poor that all his worldly possessions would fit in one medium-sized duffel bag. “You sure I can’t talk you out of this?”
She looked up at him. “I’m not going far, Anthony.”
“Al, honey, I’ve known you a long time. I watched you grow up. I know what you’re going to do.”
He saw a change in her eyes. “Do you now?”
“You’re going to start a war.”