Chin - 04 - No Colder Place

by S. J. Rozan

  The rattle of cups and saucers made us both turn. Anna entered the room with a tray; Tony, looking grateful for something to do, rushed to clear off the coffee table so she could put it down.

  “Mr. Smith is from Chuckie,” Mrs. Pelligrini told her sister. She seemed to sit up a little straighter, to try a little harder at pulling herself together. I realized with a small pang of guilt that that was out of respect for who she thought I was. “He’s going to help.”

  Anna, bending over the coffeepot, looked at me. Her distrust was obvious.

  “Chuck hasn’t helped much yet, Elena,” she said. She streamed black coffee into a white porcelain cup, handed it to me. She lifted the creamer and sugar bowl in manicured hands; I thanked her, turned them down.

  Elena Pelligrini waved her hand, as if shooing her sister’s remark away. “He tried. It’s not his fault. My Lenny …” She cut herself off just as I heard a catch come into her throat. Leaning her short form forward, she poured a cup of coffee for herself, added cream and sugar. Looking away, she sipped at it. Her sister offered me biscotti, and we drank our coffee in silence for a while, until Mrs. Pelligrini was ready to start again.

  “My Lenny,” she said, her voice clear but damped-down, “I couldn’t tell him anything. A mother can’t. I thought Chuckie could, that’s why I called him, but it isn’t his fault that Lenny wouldn’t listen. It isn’t his fault, what happened.”

  “What did you want Chuck to tell him, Mrs. Pelligrini?” I asked quietly, sipping coffee.

  “Chuckie didn’t tell you about it?” She sounded surprised.

  “I’d rather you told me,” I said apologetically. “Otherwise I feel like I’m playing telephone.”

  She nodded; that seemed to make sense to her. She finished off her coffee, placed the cup carefully on the tray, put her hands, folded, in her lap. “About Louie Falco,” she said. She muttered something under her breath, in Italian, looking down; then she lifted her eyes back to mine and went on. “I asked Chuckie to talk to Lenny. Lenny, he’s—he was … was a wild boy. Not a bad boy. But he wanted to be like them.”

  “Like Falco?”

  “But to a boy … it’s like cowboys and Indians. You can see, even a mother can see why. They have money, cars, beautiful women. Respect. They can walk in a room, everybody looks at them. What they do to get it, what that’s like, what it makes them into, you can’t expect a boy to see that.”

  From the corner of my eye, I caught Anna Mannucci looking at Tony, an expression on her face something like fear. And I saw Tony pretending he didn’t know.

  “And you wanted Chuck to help?”

  “Just to talk to him. Because Chuckie and Louie, everyone knows. So Lenny might listen, because he knows Chuckie don’t make it up, he really knows.”

  “What is it everyone knows?” I asked. “About Chuck and Louie?”

  “I don’t mean it’s some special thing, like something that happened,” she said, almost apologetically, trying to make clear for me that she was talking about something she obviously thought I already knew. “Just what friends they used to be, when they were kids. Growing up, before one went one way and one went the other. How Chuckie could have been like Louie, if he wanted to. All the money and everything.”

  “And you wanted him to talk to Lenny about that?”

  “Because everyone respects Chuckie, looks up to him. Even my Lenny did. A man of honor, the old-fashioned kind of man.”

  “And Lenny knew that about him?”

  “Everyone knew. He’d just made lieutenant, when he quit. And he loved being a cop. He’s almost like a legend in this neighborhood. You could tell him that. I told him, but I don’t think it sank in.”

  “When he quit?” I said. “Four years ago?”

  She nodded, gave me a confused look. Anna Mannucci gave me one too, more suspicious.

  “You don’t know about it?” Mrs. Pelligrini asked.

  “I just work for him,” I said. “His personal life …” I shrugged, let that hang there, hoped it was enough.

  “Well, that’s like Chuckie,” Mrs. Pelligrini said. “Not to brag.” It didn’t sound to me like the Chuck DeMattis I knew, but I waited for the rest. She said, “They put him on a task force, at the police. They didn’t know where it would lead, but Chuckie did. Right back to Louie. They hate each other now, you know.”

  I nodded, as though I knew.

  “Louie … his poor mother, she acts like she don’t know, but she knows. He’s bad. He kills people. Now I guess he’s big enough, he gets other people to kill for him. Chuckie hates him, because of what he’s like now, and he hates Chuckie because Chuckie’s not like him. Chuckie could have done it. He was a cop, it was his job. But he quit.”

  “Quit being a cop?” I said. I repeated it to her as I understood it, to see whether I had it right. “So he wouldn’t have to take a spot on the task force that was going to bring Louie down?”

  “Well, he couldn’t, could he? It’s not right. With what friends they used to be. With his mother still right here on the next block, his sisters and their children. He couldn’t do that.”

  “So he quit. So he wouldn’t have to.”

  She nodded. “And that’s why I wanted him to talk to my Lenny. I thought it would help. And I suppose Chuckie felt responsible, I suppose that’s why he wanted to help.”

  “Responsible for what?”

  “If he stayed on the task force, maybe they could have done it. Arrested Louie and sent him to jail. But they didn’t. After a while they just gave up. And kids like my Lenny, that made them think Louie was even tougher, better than the cops.”

  “And so you thought if Chuck talked to Lenny, it would help?”

  She nodded. “But it didn’t. I suppose it was too late already.”

  Her eyes suddenly moistened, and she looked down at her hands, at the carpet. She pulled a white handkerchief from her sleeve, wiped at her eyes, tucked it away again.

  “But he sent you now,” she said huskily. “He wants to help now. That’s so good. That’s so much like Chuckie.”

  “Can I help?” I asked. “Now?”

  “Of course,” she said. “That’s why he sent you and didn’t come himself. That’s why he didn’t say anything when he came to the funeral home, why he left so fast. He still can’t do anything to hurt Louie, not himself. That’s not different. But he must know that what happened to my boy had something to do with Louie.”

  “How would he know that?”

  “He keeps track of Louie. He always has. He can’t hurt him, but sometimes he can stop him from hurting other people. He must know. See, he sent you. And that’s your job, isn’t it?”

  “My job?”

  “To stop Louie. To be the one. Chuckie can’t. So that must be your job.”

  seventeen

  my job. I drove along the quiet streets of Howard Beach, thinking about my job. At the tree-shaded park on the corner, little kids played in sandboxes while bigger ones jumped their skateboards on the sidewalk. The windows in the car were open, the way they usually are, and I could hear the bravado of teenage boys shouting to each other, young skinny boys who owned the world but sometimes, in the middle of the night, wished they still believed their teddy bears could talk. Kids who were scared of being scared. Kids who could easily fall for the swagger of a gangster like Louie Falco, if they believed he wasn’t scared of anything.

  I pulled into a one-story shopping center where the paint was peeling off the slender steel columns at the covered walkway. I found a pay phone and called Lydia. Her workday was over by now too, and I caught up with her in her office.

  “Do you think it’s true?” she asked when I’d told her about Lenny Pelligrini and Chuck DeMattis, about Lenny’s mother and my job.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It could be. If Chuck can’t bring down Louie Falco himself but wants him brought down, maybe that’s what this is all about.”

  “What does Joe Romeo have to do with it? That’s where we started.�
��

  “Mrs. Pelligrini said Chuck keeps track of Louie. Maybe he knew Romeo was involved with him somehow. Maybe he knew following Romeo’s trail would lead us back to Falco, back to something we could prove.”

  “Then,” she said, “you’re right that something was strange about Mr. DeMattis, but it’s not what you were worried about. It’s the opposite.”

  “If it’s true,” I said.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Call Chuck.”

  Chuck was in his office too, getting ready to go home for the day. I told him where I was.

  He hesitated. “Shit,” he said. “What are you …?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Shit,” he said again.

  “Meet me,” I said.

  “Yeah.” I heard him sigh. “There’s a bakery, not far from you.” He told me where. “They make good coffee, have a couple of tables. Sometimes they got the opera on.”

  “However you want it,” I said.

  It would take Chuck half an hour to get here. That gave me time to walk around a little and think, to find the bakery, and to set up something else. I did the thinking first, leaving the car at the shopping center, walking along the concrete sidewalk that took me past an auto-body shop, a bridal-gown store, a couple of bars. I lit a cigarette at the corner, turned off the commercial street into a residential area, walked past white-painted houses and houses of red brick, houses where the small yards were wrapped with chain-link fence to keep in barking, bounding dogs, houses where the yards were open and full of sweet-smelling roses. I wondered where in this neighborhood Chuck had grown up, on what street, in what kind of house, then decided I didn’t want to know.

  I finished a second cigarette as I approached the shopping center again, from the other direction. I made another phone call, then got back in the car, headed toward Santoro’s bakery the way Chuck had told me.

  At Santoro’s the air was scented with brewing coffee, with yeast and cinnamon. Three marble-topped tables hugged the wall opposite the glass cases filled with pies and cakes. Two heavy women, beaming, talking, eating cannoli, sat at one; a young mother and her spoon-banging three-year-old took up another. At the far end of the kitchen I could see a screen door.

  “You have tables outside?” I asked the spectacled, skinny kid behind the counter.

  He wiped his hands on his apron and led me through the kitchen, where the rich sugary smell of cookies baking followed us out through the screen door into the garden. The garden was tiny, a high-fenced, stone-paved yard barely big enough for the four white metal tables and eight folding chairs it held. But it was private, and it was empty.

  The kid brought me an espresso; I’d barely started it when Chuck arrived.

  He smiled, stepping down from the kitchen onto the paving stones. The smile seemed real, but tentative; it wasn’t hearty, hail-fellow, the way Chuck’s smiles usually are.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I didn’t smile back, said nothing. Chuck sat on the folding chair across from me while the kid set an espresso down on the table for him. When the kid left, Chuck looked around the tiny garden.

  “I practically grew up here,” he told me. “Worked at Santoro’s all through high school. That’s when Santoro owned the place. Now it’s his son-in-law. Santoro sold it to him, retired to Florida.”

  “I went to see Elena Pelligrini,” I said.

  “I didn’t want you to do that.” Chuck’s answer was direct and calm, matching my own tone.

  “I know that now. I wasn’t bright enough to figure it out before, when you said not to bother with the Pelligrini kid, that there was nothing there. I thought you were just trying to save me trouble. Did you know he was dead?”

  Chuck picked up his espresso, sipped it, put the thick cup carefully down. “No. I didn’t know that until they pulled his body out of the basement.”

  “But you suspected.”

  “No. If I’d thought something had happened to the kid, I wouldn’t have told you to forget about him, not for nothing.”

  “You told me to forget about him again last night.”

  Chuck’s eyes moved across the stone floor, along the whitewashed fence, as though he were looking for something, something he’d left here. “That’s true,” he said softly. “The kid was dead by then. You couldn’t help him.”

  “What did you think had happened to him, Chuck?”

  “I thought he was smart enough to have disappeared, gotten the hell away, where that son of a bitch Falco couldn’t get to him.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes they do.”

  I drank some more espresso; so did Chuck. “Not bad,” he said, with a soft smile. “Almost as good as mine.”

  “What did happen to him?” I said quietly.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what he was into. But he was in way over his head, whatever it was.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Chuck looked at me, not smiling now. “Lenny Pelligrini was twenty-two. All he wanted was to be somebody, get out, see the world. To have the maître d’ rush over whenever he walked into a restaurant. Louie Falco eats kids like that for breakfast.”

  “You think Falco killed him?”

  “Whatever he was messed up in with Falco, got him killed. You ask me, that means the same as Louie killed him.” He brought his espresso to his lips again, drained the cup. He lifted it, gestured with it to someone in the kitchen, put it down.

  “What you said about someone shaking down the Crowells,” I said. “That was bullshit, right?”

  He nodded, without words.

  “Just to keep us on the case?”

  “I don’t know what Louie’s doing up there, on that site,” Chuck said. “But whatever it is got the kid killed. I needed you to stay up there.”

  “Pelligrini’s mother thinks my job is to bring down Louie Falco for you,” I told him. “That I’m supposed to do what you can’t do.”

  Chuck’s eyes wandered the garden again. Pots of red geraniums shone against the whitewashed fence, some in sunlight, some in shadow. He turned back to me. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” I stood suddenly, stalked a few paces, stopped, my back to Chuck. There was no place to go in this tiny garden. I turned. “Who the hell are you to use me as a cat’s-paw?”

  Chuck stayed seated, shook his head. All the heartiness was gone now; he looked weary, sad. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I couldn’t set it up like that. If I could do that, I could do it myself. Son of a bitch …” He looked around, at the geraniums, the tables and chairs, as though trying to find something to help him explain it to me. A neighboring tree hung over the fence, sharing its shade with us.

  “When we were kids, Louie and me, I had a dog,” Chuck said. “Butch, his name was. Louie’s mom didn’t like dogs, so he never had one. Me and Louie and Butch, it was like the Three Musketeers. Everywhere we went it was together.” He looked at me, made a hopeless gesture with his hands, as though he knew that whatever he had wouldn’t be enough. But he went on. “One time, when Louie and me were about nine, dumb dog ran out into the street. Car was coming fast. I was scared shitless, I couldn’t move. Louie, he charges out there, pushes the stupid dog away. Dog ended up without a scratch. Car hit Louie.”

  “And?”

  “Couple of weeks in the hospital, all summer in a cast. Nine years old. Leg healed crooked. He still walks a little funny, limps. You wouldn’t see it unless you know, but I know.”

  The screen door creaked open, and the skinny kid came out with two fresh espressos. He looked at Chuck, at me standing, and stopped, lost. Chuck gave the kid a small smile, tapped on the table for the espressos. The kid put them down and left.

  “He going to listen through the door?” I asked Chuck.

  Chuck shook his head. “Santoro’s son-in-law won’t let him.” He pushed one of the new espressos to my side of the table. “Come on, sit down.
”

  “What are you saying, Chuck?” I asked, still standing. “Louie Falco saved your dog, so now he gets to kill whoever he wants, and you just stand there?”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Chuck leaned toward me. “I grew up with the guy. I dated his sister. My mother and his mother, they still pick each other up for church. My old man was a pallbearer when his old man died.”

  He kept his eyes on mine. My face must not have changed. “Don’t you have anyone like that?” he asked, part incredulous, part pleading. “Someone you go back so far with that it don’t matter anymore what it’s about? That you got to do them favors and get them out of trouble even though you can’t stand them anymore?”

  I shook my head. “No. There’s no one like that.” I came back to the table, sat, lit a cigarette. I smoked about half of it; Chuck said nothing. The wind rustled the tree’s branches, moving the shade around. I asked, “You do Falco favors, Chuck?”

  He was silent a long moment. “I guess maybe,” he finally said, quietly. “I could have taken him up once or twice, but I didn’t. If that’s a favor, I guess I did.”

  “You warn him?”

  “Christ, no. I even tried to set it up so someone else would see it, so someone else could follow it back to him, but no one picked up on it. That was all I could do. You gotta believe me. That was all I could do.”

  “And now?” I lifted the new espresso, tried it. It was as good as the first, bitter and strong, still hot. “That’s what you’re doing now, too?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Now, too.”

  “Romeo? That was bullshit?”

  “No, that was the beginning. For you to follow it back.”

  “Romeo was tied into Falco? You know that for a fact?” The sun had slipped out from behind the roof of a house. Delicately, it picked out one red geranium in its pot as though it were somehow special, different from the others.

  “Got to be. Falco’s involved in something on that site. If Romeo was too, dope, thefts, whatever, it’s gotta lead to Falco.”

  “What is it he’s involved in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t believe you.”