by Norman Green
“You don’t need to worry about me,” she said. “So what if Marty wakes up and tells you who shot him? You think you’ve got your guy?”
“Marty’s shooting and Willy’s death are connected,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“My gut tells me.” He glanced her way again. “I trust my gut. I trust it a hell of a lot more than I trust crime-scene techs. So if Marty wakes up, yeah, I would consider that a big break. We can probably put one bad guy away. And I’m guessing, whoever the guy is, we squeeze his nuts hard enough, we’ll find out what happened to Willy. But if Marty bites it, you’re in big trouble, Miss Martillo. Whoever this guy is, good bet he’s killed twice now. Attempted it twice, anyhow. First Willy, now Marty. Twice is a pattern. You know what I’m saying? He’s into it. As a matter of fact, he might try for you just for the hell of it. So I’m saying, you’re gonna need all the friends you can get.”
Al trusted her gut, too. “You wanna be my friend, Salathiel?”
“Hey, listen. I’m just looking for the bad guys. That’s my job. I like to think I’m pretty good at it. I don’t think you’re one of the bad guys, Miss Martillo, but I think you might be hanging out in fast company. You might be on Caughlan’s team, fine, it’s not a crime. But don’t make the mistake of thinking Caughlan is going to protect you. Mickey Caughlan takes care of Mickey Caughlan. There’s more than one man among the missing who thought different. And if these local storm troopers out here think they can get any mileage out of sticking you with that B&E in the Bronx, or for anything else they can get you for, they’ll do it. So, like it or not, you got some exposure here. You’re vulnerable. Way I look at it, though, that’s the least of your worries.” He reached into his jacket pocket, fished out his business card. “You can call me anytime, day or night. I think someone killed Willy Caughlan, and I think the same someone tried to kill Marty Stiles. I got a gut feeling that you’re next up.”
“Sal, do you know what happened to Willy Caughlan’s laptop?”
He looked at her for a moment. “No,” he finally said. “And we looked, too. We talked to everyone who knew him, we canvassed all the computer repair joints in his neighborhood, but we came up with nothing. Is that what you were doing up in that house in the Bronx?”
“No comment. What’s your gut tell you about Willy’s laptop?”
“Do you have it?”
“No. But there’s a couple places I haven’t looked yet.”
He looked out through the windshield. “There are rules to this game,” he said. “I generally play by them.”
“So what’s your gut tell you about Willy’s laptop?”
He shrugged. “Can’t say for sure. But if we find it, I’m guessing it’ll give us a little bit more to work with than we got right now.”
“I’ll keep your card,” she told him. “I come up with anything, I’ll give you a call.”
He held the door for her when they got back to the hospital. “You’re very smooth, Salathiel,” she told him as she got out.
“I do my best,” he said. “That your van, over there?”
“My uncle’s,” she said.
“I have a few things I would like to ask Sarah Waters,” he said. “Shouldn’t take but a few minutes. Would you mind giving her a lift back into the city when I’m done?”
“No problem,” she said.
“You can’t see this guy again.”
“What?” Alessandra couldn’t believe her ears. It had been a long time since anyone had tried to tell her what to do. “What did you say?” She stood on the sidewalk in Bensonhurst, the solidly Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn where Sarah Waters lived with her two kids in the basement of her parents’ house. She wanted to hang up, snap the little cell phone closed and end the call, but she didn’t.
“Now you listen to me, Al, I’m your father, and I’m telling you this for you own good. You need to stay away from this guy, he’s not what he’s telling you he is.”
“Look,” she said, fighting a quick hot rising tide. “I don’t have time for this, okay? Leave my private life alone.”
“Al, you have to listen to me. I don’t want you seeing this guy again. I don’t want . . .”
Bensonhurst seemed to fade and disappear, and she was back outside the front door to her mother’s apartment, the hallway like a yellow-painted concrete vault. She was trying to see past the fireman, trying to get a last look at her mother’s body on the floor. She could still see the unearthly pale gray of her mother’s face, she could still smell the gas, even after they’d shut off the stove and opened the windows. She remembered struggling to breathe in the suddenly stifling heat, she remembered voices in the background, arguing, she felt the fireman’s hand gripping her shoulder. She remembered feeling completely and irrevocably alone. She remembered being frozen in fear, unable to move, or speak, or think, or cry.
Her cell phone had gone quiet. She stared at the sidewalk. He waited a moment longer.
“Al?”
She inhaled, and the spell was broken. Where were you, she wanted to say, where the hell were you? But she didn’t. “I don’t give a damn what you want,” she said, her tone harsh. “You said you could help me, and like a fool I thought you would. This is not helping. For once in your life, why can’t you just give me what I need?”
“I have to see you,” he said. “Today. Right now.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t? Goddammit, this is serious, Al!” She could hear the affront in his voice. “What are you doing right now that’s so important that—”
“I have a life!” She shouted it into the phone, her voice right up on the edge of breaking. All her buried resentment bubbled to the surface. “Why do I need to explain that to you?”
“You wouldn’t have a life if it wasn’t for me! I fed you! I clothed you! I—”
“You sent money!” she shouted. “And then, when I needed you the most, after I left Mag’s house, you know what you did?” She paused, unsure of her balance, breathing into the silence. She fought to regain control, went on in a quieter voice. “You gave up on me. You sat up there on your altar, wearing your vestments, and you waited for me to crash and burn. And you were disappointed when it didn’t happen. Weren’t you?”
“Al, honey, I never—”
“You told me they’d put me in reform school if I ran away! Do you remember that?”
“Alessandra, I didn’t want you running the streets. I wanted you safe. Magdelena would have kept you away from the criminals and the slimeballs.”
“The slimeballs took better care of me than she did. Or you.” He’d gone silent again. “Do you remember that pool hall down on Bedford Avenue?”
“Loan sharks.” She could hear the contempt in his voice. “Bookies. Pimps. Hustlers.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But they used to make sure I had something to eat. They made sure I didn’t freeze to death. Someone in there told Tio Bobby where to find me.” She wasn’t totally sure of the last one, but she threw it in, anyway. “Maybe without them you would have been right. Maybe I would have gotten locked up somewhere.”
She heard him exhale into the phone. “I never wanted that.”
“You waited for it to happen.” She looked at her watch. “I can’t meet you,” she said. “Not today. It’s too late, anyhow, there’s someplace I have to be early tomorrow morning. I need to get some sleep.”
“Al, listen to me.”
“Do us both a favor,” she told him. “Tell me what you found out. Can you just do that?”
“All right,” he said, after a moment.
There was a neon sign in the first-floor window. ARMANDO’S, it said, as if that was enough. It was a restaurant that specialized in BBQ, collard greens, corn bread and cold beer. It was a fine place to eat, but the chances that it would be discovered by the cuisinistas were vanishingly small, due primarily to its location in the dark heart of Brooklyn. Hard to have mu
ch of an appetite when you’re worried about your car . . .
The neon sign in the second-floor window was about half the size of the one downstairs. It also said, simply, ARMANDO’s, and if you didn’t know the nature of the business transacted inside, you didn’t belong there. It occupied one whole floor of a building on Bedford Avenue, one flight up. You could find most kinds of trouble at Armando’s, but if you were an aspiring pool player in New York City, you went to Armando’s to be measured, without sentiment and without mercy.
Armando, whoever he had been, was long gone. The place was operated by a black man named Philip Giles. Al had known him since she was twelve and homeless. He had paid her, back then, gave her a few bucks to sweep up, and on rare occasions, when it was brutally cold outside, he would forget to throw her out before closing up. Al thought he had been the one who’d ratted her out to Tio Bobby, but she’d never asked. If there was a sentimental bone in Philip Giles’s body, he kept it well-hidden. Al wasn’t sure she really trusted him, wasn’t sure if the two of them were really friends, but he and the other regulars at Armando’s were protective of her. It wasn’t anything they said, but they wanted her to be all right, she could feel it, and it was a sensation she treasured.
The main room was occupied by eleven pool tables. There were two more in a small room in the back, and that was where the serious games were played, the ones involving heavy money. Al had never played there. Giles had not allowed her back there as a child, and she had avoided it since. She remembered his dark face in hers, his skin the blackest she’d ever seen on a human being, his intense and somewhat hostile expression tempered by his soft voice and precise diction. “Gambling,” he’d told her, “will send you straight to hell.”
Al stood with a half-dozen others in the main room, watching a game in progress. White kid, college age, was playing a black guy, one of the regulars. The shooter was silent, but he had an associate nearby who talked nonstop. Philip Giles walked up behind Al. She pretended not to notice him.
“Hello, little sister,” he said. “Come to work on your game?”
“Little rusty,” she said, even though it was not true. As poor as it may be, she’d come for the company. “Who’s the mark?”
Giles understood her question. Which one was the fish, and which one the fisherman? “Joe College,” Giles said, “has a real fine hand. But he’s got one big flaw.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“He wants them to like him.”
“Ah. And they want to eat his lunch.”
“Won’t happen,” he said. “They’re not good enough.”
Al turned and looked at Giles. He seemed untouched by time. The years had deepened the creases in his face but otherwise he was unchanged. “So they’re just having a friendly game then.”
“So far,” he said. “You still wasting your time with Marty Stiles?”
She didn’t know the answer to that. “It’s a job,” she said.
“A miserable excuse for a job,” he told her. “You know you can do better.”
It sounded like a conversation they’d had before. She looked around. “I can’t play for a living,” she told him. “This is not who I want to be.”
“How do you know I was talking about shooting pool?” he asked her. “You have no faith in yourself, little sister.”
It galled her, how everyone seemed to think it would be so easy for her to move up. Sure, she thought, I’ll just walk into some corporate building, ask them if my office is ready. She was trying, she wanted someone to understand that. She was doing the best she could but it never seemed like it was enough. It seemed to her that she was hanging onto the bottom rung, and at times it took all of her strength not to let go. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But hey, you know what? I got to drive a Lamborghini the other night.”
“What was it like?”
“Sweet,” she said. “I never danced with Fred Astaire, but I imagine it would feel like that.”
“Doesn’t count,” he told her. “Not if you had to give it back. You let me set you up with a few games, you could buy your own Lambo, if that’s what you want. How is that not better than what you’re doing now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I want them to like me, too.”
“A terrible weakness,” he said. “You should work on it.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Listen, can I ask you a question?”
“Business or personal?”
“Business,” she said, and she asked her question.
“How much heat will come with this?” he said.
“You never know.”
“What are you trying to do? And what did this guy do to piss you off?”
She thought before she answered. “I can’t prove it yet, but I think he killed someone,” she said. “And no, I’m not looking to knock him off. I just want to expose him for what he is. After that, you know, I’m gonna let go of it and let nature take its course.”
He gave it a minute. “All right. Since you’re family, so to speak, we’re probably looking at ten grand.”
“Haven’t got ten,” she said. “How about seventy-five hundred? I could give you cash.”
“I tell you what. Keep your money, let me set you up with one game.”
She swallowed. “One time only.”
He nodded.
“Deal,” she said.
“Beautiful thing,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “All right, here’s how this is going to work: if this is my one shot with you, it’s going to take time to set it up properly. You’d better figure on playing in just about a month. In the meantime, I want you in here once a week to polish your game. I want you sharp, you hear?”
“Yes, Giles.” Now that it was done, it didn’t seem so terrible.
She made her call from the sidewalk in front of Armando’s. She wanted to do it before she had time to reconsider.
“That doesn’t sound like a plan,” he said. “It sounds like a way to kill yourself.”
It had taken her half a bottle of Portuguese rosé to screw up enough courage to call him. Asking a guy to help you, she thought, is like looking for milk in the liquor store . . . She wasn’t all that sure of the scheme herself, but it was the best one she had, and better than nothing. She wanted to feel committed to it, she wanted to feel comfortable that it would work, but talking yourself into believing your own bullshit is a dangerous habit. She couldn’t bear the thought of going back to square one, though. “Will you do it?”
“Al, is there any way I can talk you out of this?”
“No,” she said.
“There’s gotta be a better way. Can’t you just—”
“Listen to me,” she said. “I’ve got this covered. You have to trust me. Now answer my question: will you do it?”
It was a long, agonizing five seconds before he answered. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m gonna wear my funeral suit, though. You’re crazy, you know that?”
Twenty-two
There was a particular smell about the place, a penetrating odor that was almost a physical presence, some reeking thing standing next to you, instantly recognizable. They used to call them garbage trucks, Alessandra thought, now they’re environmental service vehicles, but they still smell the same. There was a constant grinding racket, the roar of big diesel engines mixed with the whine of hydraulics and the staccato hammering of heavy air-powered tools.
They were ready for her this time, or at least they thought they were. The building was bathed in light, inside and out. It was in the center of a large, unpaved parking lot in an industrial part of Yonkers, New York, just north of the Bronx. The place was surrounded on three sides by an eight-foot brick wall topped with concertina wire, and by the river on the fourth. Security guards stood at both the entrance and exit to the yard, and a few more uniforms could be seen wandering around inside the building.
It looked like a giant airplane hangar, with huge garage doors standing open at both ends, and it was filled with
garbage trucks and the men and equipment necessary to care for them. Most of the trucks were back from their rounds, had already been serviced, refueled, and parked in green rows in the gloomy, poorly lit space between the building and the river. The drivers and their helpers were long gone, and now the mechanics and refuelers were leaving, too, their jobs done for the night. A cold rain fell straight down out of the black sky, and the guards posted at the gates stood still, miserable in their yellow rain jackets.
Alessandra wore a poncho, dark green to match the color of the garbage trucks. She had slipped into the back of the yard by way of the river, using a tiny plastic inflatable raft she’d bought at a camping store. She had a large, lumpy green knapsack, which she took off once she’d clambered up the embankment from the river. A week ago, she’d have carried it without noticing the weight, but now she had to stop and put it down when she got to the first row of trucks. She sat down on the ground and leaned back against a tire to rest. She was still weaker than she wanted to be. You shouldn’t have stayed out so late last night, she told herself. You should have gone to bed like you said you were gonna. Screw it, she told herself, the hard part’s done. Still, she gave herself a few minutes to sit there and recover.
There were forty-three trucks. Each new one Tomasino added to his fleet cost him in excess of a hundred and forty thousand dollars. A new engine cost about twenty-five grand, installed. Still, business had been good, competition was sparse, and Green World Recovery was growing as the surrounding towns began making efforts to reduce their landfill costs. The future was bright, if pungent.
Each truck carried a large, squarish, steel fuel tank under the cab on the driver’s side, with steps welded on for the driver to climb up. The fuel cap was a round four-inch brass cap screwed loosely on the top of the tank. Alessandra levered herself up off the ground, opened the tank on the truck nearest to her, took a plastic bottle out of her knapsack, poured the contents into the tank, then replaced the cap. She slipped over to the next truck and repeated the process, kept it up until her knapsack held only empty plastic bottles. It was still fully dark when she got back to the river, got back into her inflatable, and paddled away in the dark.