“How does he live?”
“Big Molly,” Kearns said, and set about padlocking the door.
Bassett noticed the color at his neck again. “What does she do?”
Kearns threw him a covert glance. “Works for Billy,” he said tersely.
From there Kearns began his check of the village taverns, working south from the police station. He had his best deputy working toward the town from the northern limits. Even if Bassett had had the time to make the tour with him, he knew it was a job better left to the local talent. He went himself to search for the boy, Georgie Rocco.
9
MRS. TONELLI WAS IN the habit of taking her daily walk just before her lunch. The sun was at its warmest at that hour, and she was at her most alert. After lunch she liked to nap, and after that on weekdays she could watch the children coming home from school. As soon as she left the house, she moved along at a good clip for a woman nearly eighty, to the scene of last night’s fire. Fires frightened her, this one had particularly, the whole house so quickly destroyed. She slept downstairs, living alone. But even so it was not going to be safe for her to live alone much longer.
She poked a bit with her stick along the fringes of the ruin, then at a piece of furniture cast out by the firemen. She clucked her disapproval at what she saw, nothing worth risking lives over in the first place. Catherine Rocco had never been one for putting money into the house, not that she ever had much of it—from her husband at least. Twelve thousand dollars was a lot of insurance. But Gerry Mancuso could sell insurance on a blind man’s eyes. She watched a mangy white dog scratching under the bushes. Hydrangea bushes: she remembered telling Johanna that there was too much lime in the ground for them here; they would blossom to a sick greenish pink and never come to their full color. Suddenly the Lodini bulldog streaked past her. He gave her a terrible fright. Then, in front of the mangy cur, he came to a bristling stop. The cur growled without letting go whatever it was he had in his mouth. From where she stood it looked like the inside of an old baseball. She could remember one of her boys once—she couldn’t remember which one now—taking the hide off his baseball. The center of it had been bound round with black tape, round and round a little rubber pellet at the middle. She remembered his disappointment reaching the pellet.
The bulldog began edging closer, poising each foot in the air for a second before putting it down. The cur’s hackle rose like a jagged knife. Mrs. Tonelli shouted at the dogs, orders to go home, to go away. She shouted at them in Italian then, all to no avail. The bull was circling, the cur twisting round to keep facing him.
A fight between boys or even men never failed to excite Mrs. Tonelli. In fact, although it made her a little ashamed of herself afterwards, she enjoyed a good hair-pulling between women, if she thought the subject was worth it. But the sight of dumb animals tearing at each other put her in a frenzy. She could not forgive Frank Covello his hobby of cock-raising. She had refused to vote for him for that reason, and told him so.
The bull narrowed the distance between himself and the cur. Mrs. Tonelli moved in on them, shouting and waving her stick, never giving a thought to her own safety. The bulldog charged; the cur dropped what he had in his mouth and shot up the street in full flight, the bull after him.
The old lady stood where she was for a few seconds, trying to regain her composure, to quiet her heartbeat. Then she picked her way among the debris and with the tip of her cane hooked out the cur dog’s find: it was a ball of black tape. She looked down at it, frowning, for it occurred to her that it was electrical tape, and electrical tape was what stood between half the houses in Hillside and such combustion as had occurred here last night. The women were constantly on the alert for exposed wiring, their men regularly doing, each, his own electrical patchwork, taping the wires. But what was patched, she reasoned, could be unpatched; an insurance inspector, finding the tape, might just choose to make something of it. And possibly with reason! She thought about the cocky lump of a boy who had sat confidently at her breakfast table that morning and refused to wear other people’s clothes. Without a stick save the rags on his back, without a dime for bus fare in his pocket, he had boldly asked her for a loan. And when she had proposed to give him ten dollars, he had said it was not enough. No one had ever said that to her before, not a member of her own family: they took what she gave and said nothing … Or else took nothing and left her house which was the case with Martin. There was something about young Rocco she liked. Instinctively she knew that she shouldn’t. It took no great knowledge of human nature to see that he was out to get what he could. But a certain excitement had come into the house with him. And in her own way, she was out herself to get what she could, while there was time left to enjoy it.
She saw Bassett’s black sedan approaching slowly, its solitary occupant looking here and there as though unfamiliar with the neighborhood, and guessed that his was an official mission of some sort. Without a thought to the stiffness in her bones, she bent and scooped up the tape and tucked it into her coat pocket.
Bassett parked in front of the charred ruins and got out of the car. He was aware of the sharp black eyes upon him, measuring his car, the cut of his clothes. He tipped his hat. He would have done it in any case, but he knew a matriarch when he saw one.
“Could you tell me where the people are now who lived here?”
“At the county hospital,” Mrs. Tonelli said. “The mother is ill. The children went up this morning to see her. Who are you?”
Bassett took off his hat. “I’m Raymond Bassett, a county detective.”
“If you tell me what it is you want, perhaps I could help you.”
“Nothing that can’t wait,” Bassett said. “A shame this, isn’t it?” He indicated the ruin.
“Oh, a great shame,” she said, petulant for his not having confided in her.
“But they fought hard to save it, the firemen did,” Bassett said. “They’re a brave lot of men.”
“I saw it first,” she said. “I live up there.” She indicated the house, a rambling, well-kept Victorian relic of a more prosperous period in the village’s history. “I called the fire department.”
Bassett would have bet that she saw most things first, with those eagle eyes. “Did you?” he murmured. He looked at his watch.
Suddenly the old lady realized that he was not interested in the fire at all. A detective: his business would be what had happened at the plant, MacAndrews’ death. She had heard from Mrs. Grey that MacAndrews had been murdered. That’s what they were saying in Moontown. But no one she had talked to on the phone that morning seemed to know what had happened. Or if they did, they weren’t saying. In fact, they didn’t want to talk about it at all. None of her people liked MacAndrews. Some of them hated him. But so far as most of them were concerned, he was the Graham Company, and the Graham Company was their living. An ordinarily talkative community had, overnight, voluntarily imposed a rule of silence on itself. She felt a little sorry for the detective sent in from the outside—but not sorry enough to want to help him. She heard the bus stopping on the road below. The Roccos might well be returning on it. Curious as she was as to what this man wanted with them, she did not intend to make the introductions.
“It’s time for my lunch,” she said, and with a curt nod of her head, started across the street.
Absorbed in his own thoughts, Bassett wondered if he had offended her, her departure was so abrupt. “Can I help you?” he said, seeing her use of the cane.
“How?” she said, and twisted her head round to look at him.
He smiled sheepishly. “I can see you don’t need help,” he said, “but could you tell me—where are the Roccos staying now?”
“With me,” she said, and moved on.
He could not figure out her sudden antagonism. Merely the petulance of age? He saw the name TONELLI on a marker at her walk. “Mrs. Tonelli?”
Again she turned only her head, not her body, pausing.
“Do you expect them
for lunch?”
“I will feed them if they come,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said. He felt as though he had been trying to sell her a magazine subscription.
He was sitting in the car, ill-tempered himself and trying to make up his mind what to do next, when he saw the two young people coming up the hill. Both of them were carrying boxes, which might well contain new clothes, and he remembered then having heard the bus stop. He got out of the car again and waited.
A great hulk of a lad was young Rocco. Bassett had seen him briefly the night before, trotting after him and Kearns when they left the fire. He was now sporting a splashy new orange sweater, the collar furled around his thick neck. The girl was quite something else: you would look twice at her, as Kearns had said.
“George?” he said when they came abreast of him. He tipped his hat to the girl.
“Yeah?”
“I’d like to speak to you for a moment—in the car here, if you don’t mind. I’m a police officer.”
The boy ran a pink tongue around his poutish lips. “What’d I do?”
Bassett suppressed the inclination to smile. It was the standard retort of the high school kid. “Nothing that I know of,” he said pleasantly. He needed friends wherever he could find them in Hillside. “It’s just a matter of what you may—or may not—have seen.”
“Wait up for me, Jo.”
“You don’t need to, miss,” the detective said. “He’ll be along in a couple of minutes.” He watched the boy’s eyes as they followed his sister across the street, the round, wistful eyes of a youngster who has been left somewhere he hadn’t wanted to go in the first place.
Bassett eased himself into the car and left the door open for Rocco to follow. The boy took up a lot of seat. “I got to eat lunch and get up to the football field,” he said. “We got a big game this afternoon.”
“I know. My son is on the Newport team.”
“Yeah? What’s he play? I’ll try and not rough him up.”
Bassett smiled and thought wryly that the youngster couldn’t know how reassuring that was to the father of his opposition. “Left end. His name is Johnny Bassett.”
“I’ll look him up,” Rocco said.
“What time did you get home last night, George?”
“You mean after the fire?”
“No, I mean before it. There wasn’t much to get home to afterwards, was there?”
“No.” The boy laughed nervously. “I guess nine-thirty, quarter to ten. The big game today and all. I mean—we may not beat your guys.” Bassett waited him out, for he sounded as though he would run on. The detective tried to figure out why he was nervous. But then, in the lower economic strata, fear of the police was normal. Rocco added, “I don’t know right on the button. But I was home by ten. I know that.”
“Did you make a phone call in the booth outside the lunch room?”
“That’s right. Yeah, I did just as I was starting home.”
“Could it have been at a quarter to ten?”
The boy shook his head. “I don’t think it was that late, Mr. Bassett. But maybe it was. I always hunch a little, telling Johanna when I get in. You know how it is.”
“Whom did you call?”
“My girl friend …” The boy hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then he explained: “Sometimes I call my mother my girl friend. I was calling the hospital to see how she was. She’s just had an operation, see. But that switchboard! Man, I’d hate to be dying and trying to get them on the line.”
Rocco’s girl friend had been in the Crazy Cat at closing time, so Morietti had said. Had the boy just caught himself in a lie: sometimes I call my mother my girl friend? Bassett decided not to push the matter at the moment. He was in no position himself yet to sift the lies from the truth of what anyone in Hillside told him.
He said, “Martin Scully says he wanted to use the phone at a quarter to ten—and that you got into the phone booth ahead of him.”
Rocco said expansively, “Yeah. I saw old Martin looking down at me. Did he tell you I thumbed my nose at him?”
“No. I don’t suppose he thought that a necessary detail,” the detective said. “You can go now. Good luck this afternoon.”
“Thanks,” the boy said, and scrambled out of the car. He stuck his head back for a moment. “Good luck to you, too.”
10
GEORGIE BROKE INTO A dogtrot crossing the street and kept to it all the way up the Tonelli walk. He could almost feel his skin letting go. While he’d been with the detective it had felt tight, like he was wearing new gloves only all over his body. And all the cop had wanted of him was to check up on old Martin! But that meant they knew now it wasn’t a heart attack. They were looking—but not for him. Martin had given him, Georgie Rocco, as an alibi for a quarter to ten. That was all right. That’s when he’d planned to say he started for home in the first place. He couldn’t remember now what had made him say it was earlier. But in a way this was swell: most kids lied about when they got home if there was nobody to check up on them. Poor old Martin. They’d be giving him the works, everybody knowing how he felt about MacAndrews.
As Georgie ran, the change jangled in his pocket. He had folding money left too. What he had done was persuade Jo to open a charge account at the Teen Shop. She had a job. And he’d suggested Martin Scully for reference. Jo hadn’t wanted to do it. Jo was great on the lay-away plan. You bought something neat but by the time you got it home you looked like last year’s droop in it.
The minute he opened the door he smelled steak cooking, or at the very least hamburgers. He paused only long enough to comb his hair.
Mrs. Tonelli looked him over. “Well, that is a sweater.”
“Cheerful, huh?” Georgie said. “I thought you’d like it. You don’t mind if I start eating—on account of the game?”
“Better put your napkin around your neck—if you can find your neck under that collar.”
Georgie grinned. “They call it a roll-away.”
“I thought that was a bed,” Mrs. Tonelli said. “What did the policeman want?”
“He was checking up on Martin—to see if he was telling the truth, I guess. You know, MacAndrews being murdered.” Georgie got a real thrill out of saying the words, and then a funny feeling, like somebody else had said them, like he was away up high—in the balcony in a movie maybe—looking down. And he could see MacAndrews, just a little bit of a figure lying on the cement floor. It didn’t seem to have much to do with Georgie Rocco, looking down from the balcony.
Mrs. Tonelli broke through his reverie, demanding: “Who told you that?”
The way she said it scared him a little. “I don’t know. I heard it somewhere. I mean the cop asking questions and all.”
“Eavesdropper!” she challenged. “You heard Mrs. Grey telling me this morning. Nobody else is talking about it.”
“I didn’t mean to listen,” Georgie said, almost giddy with relief. Man, after this he’d do more listening and less talking.
Johanna said, “Why are they asking about Martin?”
“I don’t know, sis. The police don’t take me into their confidence.”
Georgie filled his mouth with a great bite of the hamburger and bun. The juice spurted out of it. He had never tasted anything so delicious and said so.
“I will give your compliments to the cook,” Mrs. Tonelli said. “Eat, Johanna.”
“I’m not very hungry, thank you. I was thinking of Mr. MacAndrews’ sister.”
Oh brother, Georgie thought. “Yeah, the way she’d think about you if you were in her place. The Mafia. That’s what she calls us. All Italians are Mafia.”
“There was something to be said for the Mafia—in the old days, in the old country,” Mrs. Tonelli said. “It was the only way poor people could get justice.”
Georgie thought about that for a moment. He liked the sound of it. “Yeah,” he said, but affirmatively. The old girl had put her finger on the situation, on MacAndrews and what Georgi
e had done.
“I wish you wouldn’t ‘yah’ like a goat.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Georgie said, and in one more bite finished his hamburger. Johanna had not yet touched hers.
She saw the look in his eyes. “Do you want it, Georgie?”
“You better eat it, Jo,” he said, although the effort to say it almost made his eyes water.
Jo finally took a bite.
“Besides,” Georgie said, “I ought to go light—on account of the game.”
“You are excused, Georgie,” Mrs. Tonelli said. “I do not like to see so much suffering at the luncheon table.”
Georgie downed his milk and left the table. He was pretty sure the old lady was giving him the needle. But what the hell? If it made her feel good what did he care, as long as she was willing to pay for it in other ways? There was a time when it would have made him sore. But now he had bigger things on his mind. Just before he left the house he said, “Jo, don’t forget—ma told you to call Mr. Mancuso.”
Mrs. Tonelli waited for the door to bang as he went out, but there was no bang. Georgie was minding his manners. They were primitive, what he had of them, but he was minding them, and Mrs. Tonelli enjoyed whatever reverence she could exact from the young. She saw herself as a matriarch, but something had gone wrong early in her rule: her children had moved out of her sphere of influence.
“Johanna, you have not told me—how did the fire start last night?”
“I don’t really know. Georgie says it may have been a cigaret I knocked out of his hand—accidentally.”
“Football heroes should not smoke cigarets,” Mrs. Tonelli observed. And she thought it interesting that Georgie had not yet proposed to smoke in her presence. “Will your mother come here? Did you ask her?”
“I think she’d rather we found a place of our own, Mrs. Tonelli. But she said to thank you very much.”
“Did she?” the old lady remarked dryly. “Georgie would like to remain here.”
“I know.”
Black Sheep, White Lamb Page 9