The Other Man (Rose Gold Book 1)

by Nicole French

  “God? Family? Campari?” I joked. My grandfather loved his aperitivos. Or had. Once.

  He smiled weakly, but waved his hand through the air like the words I’d offered—the words I’d been taught to say, even half-heartedly, if I knew what was good for me—were an affront.

  “No,” he said. “Pride, Matthew. All those things, they are important. But nothing matters if you don’t have pride for them.”

  “Father Deflorio said pride is a sin, though,” I said, hoping to make him smile again. It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t argue back a little, right?

  “No, no, no,” Nonno protested hard enough that he coughed a bit.

  “Hey, hey, I was just joking, Nonno. Just breathe. I get what you’re saying.”

  But he wasn’t done. “Pride like stubborn, yeah, sure, it’s no good. But I’m talking about pride for your life, Matthew. Pride in your work. Pride in your family. Pride in doing things the right way.” He shook his hand, the skin over the veins thin as paper. “Matthew, it’s the only thing that matters. You understand? Nothing else matters.”

  He pressed the oxygen mask to his face again and took a long inhale, though his eyes—as green as mine—wouldn’t let me go.

  “Mattia.” Nonna entered the room carrying another tray of coffee and more food. Always food. She asked him in Italian if he needed anything.

  “Sit down, cara,” her husband replied.

  She cocked her head, but obediently moved to his other side.

  “Ain’t she beautiful?”

  Nonno raised a gnarled hand and touched his wife’s chin. And Nonna, who never, ever cried, had to look away before the sheen in her eyes turned to something more telling.

  “You find a good woman, Matthew, and you take pride in her too.”

  I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t stop watching the look on my grandmother’s face as she accepted her husband’s caress.

  “Okay,” I managed at the end. “I will.”

  Nonno nodded while his hand dropped to his wife’s lap. She captured it between her own and didn’t let it go.

  His eyes, though, found mine.

  “Good,” he said. “Then after I’m gone, I’ll still be here. I will still know. So, you make me proud, Matthew. You promise.”

  I stared at their entwined fingers like they had the secrets of the universe trapped between their palms. And who knows? Maybe they did.

  “Okay, Nonno,” I said. “I promise.”

  “We will send the clothes to a shelter,” Nonna was saying as she puttered around her vanity. “If you want something, take it, okay? Before you go home. But I saved something else for you.”

  She turned, holding a small charm. A silver medallion, bearing the likeness of San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples. I recognized it for another reason, though. Nonno used to wear it on a chain under his shirt. He said it made him feel closer to his family and reminded him of why he came here to do better for them too.

  “He would have wanted you to have it,” Nonna said. “I found it in the back and I realized he meant for you to take it with you when you went to the war.”

  “To Iraq?” A lump formed in my throat as she closed her age-spotted hands over mine.

  “You wear it,” she said. “The chain broke, but you can find another.”

  I accepted the charm and was about to put it in my pocket, but on a whim, tugged out the necklace already bearing the white gold crucifix I’d had since my confirmation. Quickly, I unclasped the chain and slid on the tiny medallion to join the cross, then refastened it around my neck and tucked it back under the collar of my shirt.

  When I was finished, she tapped the side of my face gently. “Are you okay, cuore mio?”

  “What?” I looked up from fixing my cuffs. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, Nonna. Why?”

  She raised a thin dyed brow. Yeah, I wasn’t fooling anyone.

  “It’s that girl,” she pronounced. “The skinny one who don’t eat enough.”

  I sighed. “Nina eats plenty. She cleaned her plate three times when she was here.”

  “Is she Italian?”

  “No, her family’s Dutch, mostly, I think. Maybe Swiss or German too. They’ve been here a long time.”

  Nonna shrugged, making it clear with a single gesture how little that mattered.

  “Her daughter is Italian, though.”

  Goddammit. Just the thought of the little girl—Olivia—leaning into Nina’s thigh made that lump come back in my throat. Right along with the urge to sprint back to Manhattan to find them both.

  At the word “daughter,” Nonna’s eyes sharpened. “She’s married too, yes?”

  I wilted. Shit. “Yeah, but—”

  “Then you leave her alone, Matthew,” Nonna cut in as she fixed my collar. “Nothing but trouble there. She’s gonna break your heart, if she don’t already. Look at you. On my couch two nights in a row. Wrinkled and tired and sad and hungry. Nothing but trouble, you see? You need a girl that is better for you than that…”

  I stared at the floor, feeling very much like I was fourteen again, absorbing my grandmother’s tirades when she realized I was cutting school or getting into fights or any number of things a teenage boy with anger issues could do growing up in New York. She would do this for several minutes if I let her.

  “Nonna?”

  Joni appeared in the doorway, dressed in her Sunday finest as well—well, Joni’s version of “finest” was up for debate in my opinion, but she seemed to think her shapeless purple dress was pretty damn nice.

  She winked at me, clearly sympathetic about the tongue-lashing.

  “Mass starts in less than fifteen minutes,” she said. “Lea says it’s time to go.”

  I slipped on the shoes that had somehow been shined overnight, and then Nonna and I shuttled downstairs to find everyone dressed and ready. A knock at the door sounded, and Frankie and Sofia announced their arrival.

  “Come on!” Frankie called from the foyer. “They’ve already started ringing the bells.”

  We all filed to the front of the house, checking shoes, coats, hats, and all the other accoutrements needed to walk the five blocks or so to St. Andrew’s.

  “The living room is back there,” Frankie was saying to a strange girl standing next to her near the door as I grabbed my coat off the rack. “Ah, there you are. Annie, this is my brother, Mattie. The one I told you about. Mattie, this is Tino’s niece, Annie. She’s visiting from Naples for the next few months. Just arrived on Wednesday. Nonna asked me to bring her since Tino has to open early.”

  “Annalisa,” said the girl with a thick Italian accent.

  “But everyone calls her Annie,” Sofia chirped from below, as if it wasn’t totally clear.

  I glanced at my grandmother, who was watching carefully from the stairs, then Lea and Joni, who also didn’t look at all surprised to see this girl. I turned back to our impromptu guest. Tino was eighty if he was a day—I sincerely doubted he cared at all whether his niece was shepherded to church on her fifth day in the country.

  Oh, the women in my family were good. Really good.

  I traded perfunctory kisses on the girl’s apple-shaped cheeks. “Piacere, sweetheart.”

  She stepped back with shining eyes. Okay, then.

  It was blatantly obvious what was going on here. My sisters, aunties, uncles—hell, pretty much everyone in this neighborhood had been angling me together with neighborhood girls since I got back from Iraq. Even Joni was bringing around her college friends, no matter that I was literally twice some of their ages.

  This one, though, was genuinely pretty. I’d give them that much. A little young, maybe. I’d guess closer to Marie’s or Joni’s ages. Petite, with deep olive skin, sooty eyes, and shining black hair that curled around her shoulders. Surrounded by the rest of the Zola women, she fit in. Like one of us.

  Annie smiled shyly, but in a way that made it very clear she liked what she saw in me too. “Nice to meet you,” she said in stumbling English.

 
; I smiled back. “You’ve been here four days? Your English is pretty good.”

  Lea glanced between us before her eyes widened. “Peter Francis Scarrone! You take your grubby mitts off your brother before I have your father take you outside!”

  Annie and I watched my sister launch across the room with impressive speed considering her condition, then turned back to each other shyly.

  “Kids,” I said. “Little devils, sometimes. Especially those three.”

  Annie giggled in that way girls do when a joke isn’t particularly funny, but they want you to think it is. Yeah, she definitely liked me, because that joke was lame as shit.

  “I wonder,” she said, “if they were the same in America like in Italy. But no. I need to see more, I think.”

  Not as shy as I thought, then. She was fishing for an invitation. A sightseeing tour around the city. An opportunity to talk that might lead to something…more…down the road.

  I swallowed while every other eye in the room landed on me, waiting for my response. There shouldn’t have been a problem. After all, I was available, wasn’t I? Move on, move on. My conscience chimed at me like Nonna’s grandfather clock. God knew I’d tried. And now I needed to try even harder.

  Find a nice girl, Father Deflorio had told me just yesterday when I left the confessional. Find a good woman, Nonno had said before he died.

  But the question was always the same. How would I treat a good woman when I knew, deep down, I wasn’t a good man?

  A good man wouldn’t have these kinds of thoughts about a married woman.

  Lust is a deadly sin. Deep down, maybe mine would be the death of me.

  “Matthew?”

  I turned to Nonna, who was tapping her watch. Frankie and Joni were still watching too.

  God bless the Zola women. Harsh saviors, all of them. Maybe my sins would kill me, but they were much stronger. They’d force me to find redemption in the end.

  Or so I hoped.

  I held out my elbow to Annie. “Shall we, honey?”

  Annie blushed. But she took my arm and allowed me to walk her to church, like I really was the gentleman everyone in that house wanted me to be. Not the dirty, no-good sinner I knew I was in my heart. It wasn’t the best step in the world, but it wasn’t the worst. After all, maybe the thing to do wasn’t to wait for change. Maybe the best thing to do was fake it until I actually did.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Look, man, I get it. I really do. I grew up in Marcy, used to smoke myself. I know what that shit does to your brain. Add pussy to that equation, it’s enough to make a man crazy, ain’t it?”

  Derek sat in the plastic chair, telling lie after comfortable lie to Roscoe Jackson, who was currently quaking in his own very uncomfortable seat. It was three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, and we had been here for nearly four hours. The raid on Roscoe’s apartment had taken place over the weekend while I pretended to be a nice guy with my family. Monday’s news came as a welcome surprise. Roscoe was held for a full twenty-four hours before we got an extension to ninety-six—just to freak him out. Then Derek and Cliff could get to work.

  On the other side of the table sat Clifford Snow, Derek’s second detective, who was playing the “bad cop” in a textbook Reid interrogation. They were halfway through the nine steps, and as predicted, Roscoe Jackson was cracking like a nut.

  Derek set his hand sympathetically on Roscoe’s skinny shoulder. The man was jonesing bad. The raid had gone better than we thought, and Derek was already suffering from intense withdrawals. The idiot had close to 500 grams of crack under his bed, all neatly bagged and ready for sale, but he was obviously pinching off the top for himself. A lot. A simple charge of narcotic use neatly turned into possession with intent to distribute—a felony that could land old Roscoe behind bars for one to nine.

  “I got two words for you, motherfucker,” said Cliff. “Mandatory. Minimums. We got the bags. And we know about the girls. How many of them know your name, huh? How many people you been talkin’ to? All it takes is one asshole with the gavel, fuckface, and you’ll end up at Rikers with so much dick up your ass, you’ll be screaming for your mama by the end of your first day!”

  He slammed his palm on the table, and then popped his hand into Roscoe’s sternum hard enough to shove the guy against the wall. Roscoe’s chair hit the brick with a bang, and he whimpered.

  “Cliff needs to dial it back,” I murmured into a headset connected to the piece in Derek’s ear. “The courts are getting even more particular about confessions under duress. Be his friend, King. He already likes your pretty face.”

  Behind Roscoe’s shaky form, I received a hooded look from Derek through the mirrors that hid my presence from the rest of the interrogation room. His meaning was clear: let me do my fuckin’ job, Zola. And normally I would let him. Derek and Cliff were the best the NYPD had. But we had one shot. The gala was in two weeks. We needed that solid grounds for an indictment, or everything was off the table.

  At this point, Roscoe had copped to just about everything we had. The girls. The safe house. But we were missing one thing.

  “I don’t know,” he moaned into his hands, swaying back and forth like he was dancing to a song in his head. “I swear, I don’t know. They never told me their names, right? They would just, like, show up. Check over the girls. Tell me to keep ’em locked up until it was time. Keep ’em drugged. Easy, since I got a piece too, right?”

  I checked the audio recording for the eleventh time, making sure that it was still on. Roscoe’s eyes flew to the left while he spoke—a clear indication, based on the rest of the evening, that he was hiding something.

  “He’s lying,” I said. “He knows. Press him, Derek. He likes you.”

  “Your sister lives on Crescent, don’t she?” Derek set his hand on Roscoe’s shoulder again and rubbed compassionately. The guy seemed to find it soothing, but also unnerving.

  Roscoe peeked through his fingers. “Wh-what?”

  “Over by the park, right? Didn’t she move—”

  “Yo, man! Don’t you touch my s-sister!”

  “You better show Detective Kingston some fuckin’ respect if you know what’s good for you!” Cliff put in with another perfunctory “bad cop” entry.

  Roscoe was effectively shook—both by the sudden mention of his sister as well as the continued seesaw of treatment he continued to receive.

  “Hey, hey, hey, no need for that, Detective Snow,” Derek said. He patted Roscoe’s arm. “Honestly, Roscoe, we just need your help. As much with your sister as anyone else.”

  “What? What d’you mean?”

  Derek clicked his tongue with sympathy. “Aw, man, you didn’t hear? She’s late on her payments to K-Money. Again. Fourth time, apparently.”

  It was one of many lies we’d told, knowing Roscoe wouldn’t know the difference. Derek’s reconnaissance had revealed that Roscoe did in fact have a sister who used to live at Cypress Hills, one of the worst housing projects in the city, barely a stone’s throw from The Hole. She shacked up for a time with a leader of the Crew, a subset of Crips that functioned as a drug pipeline through the projects of East New York—and likely trafficked other things too. Cast aside, the girl was now prostituting herself about four blocks away to pay for her own addiction.

  “I hear too, that K has other ways of getting his money back, right?” Derek cast a meaningful look at Cliff. “How many of the girls are from Cypress, Detective Snow?”

  “Seven.” Cliff was stone-faced compared to Derek’s softer demeanor.

  Roscoe began to shake. “What—I?”

  “Did you know they were from Cypress, Roscoe?” Derek asked. “Damn, I see you probably did, huh? Shit, man. Intent to distribute and trafficking. That’s rough. That’s at least fifteen or twenty. Maybe life if the judge is a woman.”

  Roscoe’s shaking turned into rocking.

  I stepped closer to the window. “Break, goddammit, break.”

  Derek’s eyes flashed at me through
the mirror, a clear signal to shut the fuck up.

  “All right!” Roscoe shouted finally. “What do you…what do you need?”

  “Just a couple of names,” Derek crooned. “We need to know who’s taking the girls. We need to know who showed up in that big black Escalade, Roscoe. Who’s the man in charge?”

  “I…I…” Roscoe rocked forward, his face plastered in his hands. When he looked up, his bloodshot eyes bugged out. “And you’ll help her? You’ll help my sister?”

  “We’ll help her get what she needs,” Derek said smoothly, easily stepping around any commitments. It was one of the worst things about this job. Everyone wanted a favor just for telling the damn truth. But the fact was, Derek’s sister was probably no closer to salvation than her brother. I knew the types. They’d both be dead or locked up within a year.

  “All right,” Roscoe said. “All right, I—you promise you won’t tell him it was me?”

  “No one is going to say who you are,” Derek replied, while I stood poised with pen to legal pad. “Who owns the safe house, Roscoe?”

  “I—it’s a man. Tall, older. Curly, kind of gray hair. Greenish eyes, and a nose like a beak. He only came by the one time to check on things, months ago. Locks, things like that. His name was—shit, man, I don’t remember, it was something like Cannon. Chaplin. Uh…”

  Derek leaned closer. “Car—”

  “Don’t,” I cut him off. “He needs to say it himself. Come on, Derek, you know better than to feed him a name.”

  Derek looked mildly disgusted with himself as he straightened. Cliff’s face didn’t move, but I could tell he was thinking the same thing.

  “Carson!” Roscoe pronounced with something weirdly akin to victory. “Yeah, that’s it. John Carson! That Jude motherfucker said it, and he snapped at him. But he called him another name too. Titan.” He started muttering. “K-Money, he was driving that same truck, a Titan.”

  “And that’s how it’s done!” I whirled around in victory to face the precinct’s chief, who was nodding in approval from the back of the room. “That’s it! Motherfucker, you got it! Did you hear that? Hook, line, and fuckin’ sinker!”