by S. J. Rozan
I expected anger, defensiveness; all I got was a shake of the head. “No, it’s true. When I heard they were having problems, the thefts and shit, and I knew he’s got something going up there, I figured that’s got to be Louie. That’s everything I got. I was looking for you to follow it back.”
“How do you know he’s involved?”
“Word on the street. I keep track of him.”
“That’s what Elena Pelligrini said.”
“What?”
“That you keep an eye on him. That you sometimes get in his way.”
He nodded. “In small ways. Not much, but the best I can do. Like talking to the Pelligrini kid. That was supposed to be one of those times.”
“She’s grateful that you tried.”
“She shouldn’t be. Her son’s dead.”
“Not your fault, she says.”
He picked up his espresso cup. I rubbed out my cigarette, lit another. We had suddenly run out of things to say to each other, Chuck and I.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, as he had at the beginning. “You and Lydia … Thanks, anyway. I appreciate everything you did.”
I looked at my watch. “I have to meet someone,” I said. “I set something up.”
Chuck frowned, confusion showing. “On this?”
“It’s my case. We said that at the beginning. My case, to be handled my way.”
“But now … ? With this …?”
I stood. “My case,” I said. “I’ll call you.”
I pulled open the screen door, took in the aromas of vanilla, sugar, anise, as I moved through the kitchen and the bakery, out to the street. I left Chuck sitting with an espresso at the metal table, in the shade of the neighbor’s tree, in the tiny garden where he’d grown up.
eighteen
i’d left early to get to the next place I had to be, but the drive from Howard Beach to the far end of Brooklyn was long and frustratingly slow, a jerky procession of stuck traffic and honking horns. I made it to my destination just about on time. The air was full of dry dust diffusing the low sunlight as I rolled the car slowly down the pitted streets between the walls of razor wire and chain-link fence. I pulled into Sal Maggio’s auto salvage yard and parked out of range of the snarling dog on his heavy, clanking chain. The slowly swirling clouds of dust hovered over the piles of rusting iron and steel the way the mist and fog had, the first time I’d been here.
Sal Maggio must have heard the dog barking, or maybe he just had a sixth sense for when people drove into his yard. He came out of the trailer, waited at the top of the concrete steps as I left the car and made my way over there. The dog snapped at me from the end of his taut chain.
Maggio didn’t say anything to discourage the dog, just watched me approach. When I reached the bottom step I stopped.
He looked at me silently for a few moments. Then he said, “C’mon inside.” He pulled open the trailer door as I climbed the steps. “Want a beer?”
The inside of the trailer was one long musty-smelling room, bed unmade on one end, a ratty old recliner and a TV in the middle, kitchen where we came in. The floor in the kitchen was grimy vinyl tile; everywhere else was grimy carpet. A T-shirt draped the back of one of the two kitchen chairs. Maggio lifted it off and tossed it in the direction of the TV. He pointed to the chair for me and I sat as he pulled open the fridge and took out two cans of Bud.
“Thanks.” I popped the top, took a long drink. All the windows in Maggio’s trailer were open, and the heat and dust moved as easily through here as among the mounds of car parts in the yard.
“So what is it?” Maggio asked, sitting in the other chair, taking a pull from his own beer. He squinted at me as though I were something unusual. Maybe, a stranger in his trailer, I was.
“That kid,” I said. “The one whose name you found me, Pelligrini. Who fenced the frontloader.”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
Maggio took another pull on his Bud. “Shit. And?”
“You said he was tied in to Louie Falco somehow.”
“I said the guy I talked to said that.”
“Okay, the guy you talked to. I want to talk to Falco.”
“Why?”
“You want to know?”
Maggio drank more beer, squinted at me again. “No,” he said.
“Can you set it up?”
“What makes you think I can?”
“I don’t. I’m asking.”
“If I could,” he said, “why would I?”
“Because the kid was twenty-two, and now he’s dead.”
Maggio asked, “This have anything to do with Joanie?”
“No.”
“She brought you here, the first time.”
“She didn’t know why.”
“Kid was dead then?”
“I don’t know.”
I took out a cigarette, lit it. The smoke joined the dust drifting gently through the air.
“You could’ve told me ‘Yeah, Joanie wants you to set this up for me,’” Maggio said. “More than likely I’d have done it.”
“It would have been a lie.”
“You telling me you never lie?”
“Didn’t seem like the right way to play you, Maggio.”
His eyes still on me, he pulled a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, reached behind him onto the drainboard of the sink. Between the crusted dishes and the dirty coffee cups he put his hand precisely on a book of matches, blind. He lit his cigarette.
“Anything going to happen to him? Falco?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I just want to talk.”
Maggio streamed smoke. “Know why I live here?”
“No.”
“Instead of some apartment, where I could spread out a little?”
I waited for the answer.
“Trailer’s made of steel,” he said. “Rivets and welds. No bullshit. Wait there.”
Maggio got up, moved past me and through the trailer, sat on the unmade bed. He put the phone on his lap, dialed a number, had a low-voiced conversation I couldn’t overhear. He hung up, dialed a different number, had another. He waited a long time, receiver to his ear, then spoke again, and hung up. Coming back to the kitchen, he pulled another pair of Buds from the fridge. He sat again at the table, said, “It’s set up.”
I opened my can of beer, cold and wet in my hand. “He coming here?”
Maggio took a long gulp of his Bud, lowered it. “You crazy?”
“Where, then?”
“The Staten Island Ferry.”
“What?”
“Someplace public, nobody’s territory. He don’t know you, you don’t know him, right? This way nobody needs to get nervous.”
“Thanks, Maggio.”
“For Joanie,” he said.
“I told you, she has nothing to do with this.”
“Yeah. But you tell her I helped you out. Maybe next time that jerk smashes up his Triumph, maybe she’ll come here for parts.”
“I bet she will.”
He nodded. “She’s a good kid.”
I drove through the tunnel to Battery Park to catch the nine o’clock ferry, but, before the ferry, there was an argument with Lydia.
“Absolutely not,” she said when I called her from the ferry terminal to tell her what I’d found and what I was going to do. She was home by now, in Chinatown, answering the phone that rings through from her office. “Absolutely not alone.”
“You’d kill me if I said that to you.”
“But you’d be right, even so. And—”
“And,” I drowned her out, “I probably wouldn’t even get the chance to say it because you probably wouldn’t even call me to tell me where you were going.”
“Because you’d tell me absolutely not.” She dismissed that argument. “Anyway, I can be there in ten minutes. I—”
“Besides,” I rode right over that, “you probably have other plans.”
“Me? Like what?”
&nb
sp; “Like drinking with construction workers.”
“Hey,” she said warningly.
“You know I had to say it.”
“Okay, you said it. What time is the ferry?”
“No. It has to be alone.”
“No,” she said. “It only has to look like you’re alone. I’ll lean on the rail with a camera, like a Japanese tourist. He’ll never know I’m there. But someone has to watch your back.”
“I don’t want to spook him, Lydia.”
“Bill? You’re going to accuse a Mafioso of murder and you don’t want to spook him?” She sighed at the illogic of the human mind, or maybe just mine. “Besides,” she said, “do you really think he’s going to be alone?”
She won the argument, but not on logic. She won on the basis that it’s a free country and she, Lydia Chin, born and raised here, had a right to take a ferry to Staten Island any hour of the day or night with or without my permission.
I hung the phone up, walked back across the vast, echoing terminal. Red sunset gleamed in the arched western windows; a pigeon swooped through the air up to a steel joist, where it shuffled its wings and settled in for the night. I bought two hot dogs from the guy at the stand, smothered them with peppery fried onions, and watched the late commuters drifting toward the turnstiles while I ate. I wondered which one of these men, in their tie-loosened business suits or their overalls or their bermuda shorts, was Louie Falco, and which were the guys who worked for him, who would be sure to be with him, as Lydia had said.
I was the one who was supposed to be alone.
I didn’t see Lydia, but I knew she’d make it, and I knew she’d be invisible, even to the men whose job it was to watch Louie Falco’s back.
I pushed through the turnstile, to the glassed-in waiting room upstairs. A minute later, they let us on the boat, the commuters and the tourists and I.
The ferry creaked and swayed in the water, holding its berth patiently as the passengers boarded. I crossed the metal-plate gangway, went through the bad-weather room with its long wooden benches and scratched plastic windows. Outside, I took up a position at the center of the rail on the west, the way Maggio had set it up.
The salt smell of the ocean was all around me, the screech of seagulls and the wind moving over the water. Ships crowded the harbor, cut through the silvery water on their own errands. The sky, already dark in the east, was streaked with fading red and orange in the west. On my right, a young Latino had his arm around his girl, rubbed her shoulder as they gazed dreamily across the river. On my left, a large, immaculately dressed family of Japanese tourists took turns snapping each other’s picture with the lower-Manhattan skyline in the background.
A change in the rumbling beneath the deck and a loud clanking told me the ferry was ready to go; a minute later it did, pulling regally out of its slip and into open water. I looked back toward Manhattan, taking in the sights, and spotted Lydia in baseball cap and dark glasses, sitting cross-legged on a bench with a good view of the Statue of Liberty and me.
As the ferry plowed across the water, Manhattan dwindled and the dark mass of Staten Island rose through the haze. Lights twinkled on its distant shore. The cool, water-flecked wind the ferry kicked up reminded my skin it had once known weather beyond the damp heat of New York’s July. I stayed where I was, leaning on the rail, waiting. I smoked a cigarette, cupping it in my hand to keep the wind from burning it down to the filter before I could.
I’d just finished the smoke when I spotted a man of average height, and considerably more than average girth, making his unhurried way among the people walking up and down the deck. He was balding, like Chuck, and clean-shaven, and tan. His walk was uneven, but only slightly; it could have been the rolling of the boat, or the result of his weight.
He reached the place where I was, sauntered over and leaned next to me against the rail, not so different from the ferry settling into its berth. He wore a tan summer suit over a white polo shirt, not cotton knit, but silk. The suit was spectacularly well cut; it fit his bulk perfectly, even managing to hide the gun in the shoulder holster, unless you were looking for it.
He turned to peer into my face, then looked away.
“Smith?” His grainy voice was casual, unconcerned.
“That’s right.”
“Talk.”
“You’re Louie Falco?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I don’t always get what I want.”
He looked at me again, small brown eyes in a pudgy, well-kept face. “I’m Louie Falco. So talk.”
“I want to ask you about Lenny Pelligrini.”
Falco’s eyes followed a seagull gliding alongside the boat, a white shape across the striped sky. Reaching into his breast pocket, Falco slid two cigars out, offered one to me. I shook my head.
“Cuban,” he said.
“Thanks anyway.”
“Legit,” he added. “I got a damn import license. Through Switzerland.”
When that didn’t change my mind, he replaced one cigar and lit the other, watched its tip glow brightly in the salt breeze.
“I heard about Pelligrini,” he said. “It’s a shame. Young kid.”
“What happened to him?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You know anyone who does?”
The seagull took a dive into the churning water in our wake, rose with a frantic beating of wings. Falco said, “Who’re you?”
“Friend of the family.”
He nodded. “His mother send you to me?”
I missed a beat. “What?”
“His mother. She looking for me to help? To find the guy?”
Another seagull came flapping up beside the first. They squawked at each other for a moment, then both banked and wheeled away, back toward the distant towers of Manhattan.
“His mother thinks you killed him, Falco,” I said.
Falco turned his head to me and stared. “You’re shitting me.”
“Or had something to do with it. Something the kid was involved in with you.”
“Christ. I barely knew the bastard.” He shook his head, stared back over the darkening water. “He come to me all the time, Louie this, Louie that, but I got no use for him. Not real bright, you follow me?”
“What if he’d been real bright?”
“Maybe then I coulda used him. But he had no future, what I used to do, or what I do now.”
“Those things are different?”
He turned his face to mine, then back to the harbor. “None of your damn business, but I don’t care who knows. I’m getting out of the game. Strictly legit Louie, from now on. Import, export, investments, shit like that. Got tired,” he added by way of explanation, though I hadn’t asked. “Legit, I got even less use for a guy like him.” He gave a short, low laugh; it made his huge sides shift, like the movement of earth. “Guess he had no future anyway, huh? She don’t really think I killed him?”
“Yes, she does.”
He was quiet for a minute. “Guess I better talk to her.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“No?” He turned his head sharply. I felt, more than saw, two men at the edges of my vision snap to attention. “So just what the hell would you do?” Falco asked.
I ignored the two men, said evenly, “Pelligrini was stealing things off the construction site he worked at.”
Falco raised his eyebrows. He turned back to the water. The electric anger that had pulsed from him a moment ago faded as though a dial had been turned; but I didn’t get the feeling it had shut off entirely.
“No shit,” he said. “Maybe the kid had more going on than I gave him credit for. What kind of things?”
“All kinds, I think. I have him fencing a frontloader.”
“A frontloader? Jesus Christ. That’s good.”
“He wasn’t working alone.”
“So?”
“Who was he working with?”
“What the hell you asking me for?
”
“Because I thought it might be you.”
“Me? Why the hell would it be me?”
I took a breath. “Because you have something going on at that site, Falco. If it’s not the kid’s scam, what is it?”
“Me?” Falco’s face darkened, like the sky behind him. I felt the electric current increase again. “Who says I got anything going on there?”
The two men watching us began to move.
“Chuck DeMattis,” I said.
Falco stared. “Fucking Chuckie,” he said slowly. “That what this is, you’re working with Chuckie?”
“Just trying to find out what happened to the kid, Falco.”
“You said you were a friend of the family, Smith.” His voice was soft, like the sound of the distant ocean. “You shouldn’t have said that if it wasn’t true.” Falco kept his eyes on me another few moments. Then he nodded. “Now all this makes sense. Musta been Chuckie put it in the Pelligrini lady’s head I did her boy.”
“I don’t know whether he told her that. But I know he thinks it, too.”
The two men circled toward us, slowly, casually.
“Fucking Chuckie,” Falco repeated, shaking his head. “Squirrel dies in Central Park, Chuckie thinks it was me.”
“What do you have going on up on that site, Falco?”
By now the two men who were on the move had reached us. One, tall and mournful, with a turquoise stud in his ear, maneuvered his way onto the rail at my right. The other, shorter, but with the wide shoulders of a bodybuilder, came to a stop behind me, crowding close.
“What makes it your business what I got going anywhere?” Falco asked.
“Someone killed that kid, Falco. Chuck thinks it was you, because of whatever you have going up there. If he’s wrong, show me.”
“Screw you,” Falco shrugged. “This what you got me here for, accuse me of killing the kid? I thought you was looking for help.”
“I am.”
Falco regarded me evenly. Over his shoulder I could make out the wide mouth of the Staten Island ferry slip and the aging buildings around it, growing closer. “I didn’t have no reason to kill that kid,” he said. “But I got nothing to prove to you, or to fucking Chuckie. You and Chuckie better keep out of my way, Smith. I don’t want you jamming me up.”
“Not my intention. But someone killed that kid.”