Hostile Witness (20 page)

He took me inside a large low building in the center of the yard, with a ceiling of corrugated tin. He led me to something big, something long, covered with tan canvas.

“And then, hiding out there in the last stall, Mr. Carl, this is what we found.”

He grabbed hold of the side of the canvas and whisked it off. Underneath was a majestic looking thing, a long, two-seater convertible, with a golden hood and blue wheel wells front and rear. Four shining exhaust pipes snaked out of either side of the engine. There was a high, majestic grill and a spare tire hooked above the trunk and the delicate front bumper was shaped like a woman’s kiss.

“I knew we was getting a Duesenberg, Mr. Carl, but frankly I expected a wreck of some sort, not a 1936 SJ Speedster in decent condition. This baby’s got a twin overhead cam, eight cylinders, a centrifugal supercharger, tubular steel connecting rods.” He stopped speaking for a moment, staring at it in awe. “This is more than a classic, Mr. Carl. This is a work of art. This is a legend. Designed by Mr. Gordon Buehrig himself. When it first came out, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable both ordered a special model. A man who cared would give a lot for this car.”

“About how much, exactly?” I asked.

“In mint condition, at a car show, properly advertised, between two and three hundred thousand. This model hasn’t been kept up lately, it’s got some rust, the leather seats are cracked, the engine’s leaking off a little oil, needs a valve job. But it would be well worth it to spend some time and money and fix up this baby until it shines and then sell it at a show.”

“How much would we get if we auctioned it off right now?”

“These things are tough to say, Mr. Carl. It would be a distressed price. It would depend on who shows up. Probably something like forty or fifty. But that would be a shame, Mr. Carl.”

I was still getting twenty-five percent of everything I collected from Winston Osbourne. Twenty-five percent of the fifty would be twelve five. It was amazing how once money started flowing it didn’t stop. Twelve five.

“Sell it, Pete,” I said, turning around and leaving the building.

He followed after me. “But Mr. Carl, that would be a shame. I’d be honored to work on it for you. In six months, Mr. Carl, it would be mint. I promise it. But to just up and sell it like this would be a damn shame.”

I was sure it would be just that. But you see, I wasn’t a car fancier. It was just steel and leather and rubber and glass to me. And all in all, I’d prefer the twelve five sooner than anything else later. “Sell it,” I said, still walking away. Take that, you little blue-blood snot. “Sell it as soon as you can.”

NINTH STREET, NORTH OF WASHINGTON,
is the heart of South Philadelphia’s Italian Market. On weekends the street becomes a cacophonous melange of vegetable stands and fishmongers and fine meats laid out in glorious pink rows inside the white refrigerated displays. Cannoli so rich it takes a full half-hour to eat them, hoagies thick with spiced ham and provolone, drenched in fine wine vinegar and covered with hot peppers. Fresh squid soaking in their ink, prosciutto sliced so thin you can read the paper through it, okra and bok choy and radicchio, strawberries ripened to burst like flowers in your mouth. “Please, lady, please, I pick the best for you, I promise, the best in the world, the sweetest, like sugar for you, just do as I say and don’t shake the melons.” It’s a sweet old-fashioned street when the market is open, and from all over the city they come to buy the freshest seafood, the finest veal, the ripest produce. Families have owned their stalls on Ninth Street for generations, Giordano’s produce, Cappuccio’s meats, Anastasi’s freshest seafood. The Italian Market is a brilliant Philadelphia tradition, a feast for the senses and the perfect place to shop for that lavish dinner party. Just so long as you don’t shake the melons.

This happened to a friend of mine. True story. He was in the market one Saturday morning with his parents. A family outing. They were at LiCalzi’s produce store buying tomatoes. My friend’s mother is one of those women
who shake the melons and press their thumbs deep into the eggplant and take a bite of radish before buying the bunch. If there is a best lemon in the rack, a best ear of corn, a best box of strawberries, she will find it.

“Hey lady,” said the vegetable clerk, a tall fat man cloned from tall fat LiCalzi stock. “The sign says don’t touch the tomatoes. They’re all good. You want a good tomato, I’ll give you a good tomato. Here, take this one.”

“I’ll find my own, thank you,” she said.

“Hey lady, do what I tell you and stop squeezing the fucking tomatoes.”

“Don’t talk to my wife like that,” said my friend’s father.

“I’ll talk to her any way I want,” said the clerk, giving him a shove.

My friend shoved him back.

“What’s the problem here?” said another, older LiCalzi.

“The lady is squeezing the tomatoes.”

“Don’t squeeze the fucking tomatoes,” said the second clerk.

“Fuck you,” said my friend.

And that was it.

The first clerk dived over the stall, scattering tomatoes like large, squishy marbles across the street, and loosed a right cross that broke my friend’s jaw. When my friend’s father tried to pull the first clerk off his son, the second clerk grabbed him in a headlock and started pounding his face with uppercuts, one after another, like a wrestler on Saturday morning TV, shattering his nose. In the melee my friend’s mother was slugged in the eye with the second clerk’s elbow, cracking the socket. By the time the ambulance carrying my friend and his parents had left, the cops had dispersed the crowd, the stall had been righted, the tomatoes replaced, a new bin set up for tomatoes, slightly damaged, at a bargain rate, and the fat tall LiCalzi clerks were calmly weighing celery stalks for the new wave of
customers. My friend and his parents now do all their shopping at the Super Fresh.

So that is South Philadelphia, a charming ethnic enclave in the middle of the city, small immaculate row houses, terrific restaurants, churches, softball fields, Pat’s Steaks, Geno’s Steaks, two bars on every corner, little girls in their Catholic skirts smoking as they walk home from school, old people in T-shirts and shorts sitting on the sidewalk into the night listening to the Phillies on the radio and drinking cold cans of beer. But if a parking spot is marked off with folding chairs don’t take it, and if a drive-by shooting splits open the night walk the other way, and never ever shake the melons in the Italian Market because underneath the sweet ethnicity of South Philadelphia is steel.

I was sitting in my car in the gloomy darkness of 7th Street, just east of the Italian Market, watching the entrance to the Sons of Garibaldi Men’s Club. It was an old-style storefront with the windows painted in green and gold stripes except for the last two feet, left clear to let in whatever daylight could slip through. Above the door was a wooden sign with the club’s name and a boar’s head on it. With the painted windows and the closed wooden door it was impossible to see inside, but light shone out of the clear swath at the top of the windows and I saw a shadow slip across the ceiling. A man, bent with age, shuffled along the street and stopped at the heavy wooden door, giving two hard raps with the gnarled handle of his cane. The door opened from the inside and the old man stepped up and into the storefront. The door closed behind him.

What I was doing sitting in my car outside that club was screwing up my courage to go inside. What I had was a chip and some questions about a dead man and I wondered whether those two things alone were enough to get my jaw broken or my nose smashed or my eye socket cracked. But inside that club was still where I wanted to go. Prescott had
told me the mafioso princess had slept with the horny second baseman and that was why the second baseman was dead. Whether Prescott was telling me the truth or lying about Bissonette would tell me whether my trust in him would be misplaced. I wanted to trust Prescott, oh yes I did, I wanted more than anything for everything he ever said or ever promised to be true. But after those damn questions to the jury I needed some assurance and I had the feeling that the assurance I needed was inside that dangerous looking men’s club. I had no choice but to go in and get it, despite my instructions to do no more investigating and despite the threats that had come backing those instructions. See, I genuinely liked Chester Concannon, admired his calm, good-natured manner and his outsized loyalty, but it wasn’t Chester I was worried about, for if Prescott was setting up Concannon for a fall he was maybe setting me up at the same time. And maybe the deals and contacts and the promised advances to my career were as phony as any connection between Bissonette and Raffaello’s daughter. If so I might have to do something about it, don’t ask me what, but something. So, with not a little trepidation, and not a lot of confidence, I stepped out of the car, walked up to the ominous wooden door, and knocked twice with my knuckles.

The door opened slowly and what looked like one of the LiCalzi brothers stood in the doorway, staring at me while he chewed on something with his mouth open. He wore pressed jeans and a silk shirt, buttoned low enough so that I could see his pectorals, as flat and solid as flagstone. He just stared and chewed and stared some more and then, through whatever he was chewing, he said, “Yeah?”

“I was hoping I could come in,” I said.

“This is a private club.”

I reached into my suit jacket and, quick as a cobra, he grabbed me by my collar and lifted me two inches off the ground. Slowly I pulled out the chip. “I have this.”

He dropped me. I did an awkward three-point landing. “I don’t care what you got,” he said. “This is a private club. Get lost.”

“I just wanted to ask…” But before I could finish the sentence he had me turned around and hoisted by my belt, ready for tossing.

“Who is it, Giovanni?” asked a whispery, accented voice from inside the room. The voice was slow as a snake slithering toward its prey.

Giovanni put me down none too gently, gave me a look that would wither a dogwood, frisked me quickly, and, with a tight grip on my arm, brought me inside.

It was a dusty room, bare and beat, with a linoleum floor and whitewashed walls with travel posters of Sicily curling up at the edges. A fluorescent ring spit a white glow from the ceiling. There was a bar in the corner, wooden and battered, with a few bottles with pouring tops grouped together on top. Beside the bottles were six water glasses upside-down on a tray. An ancient radio with canvas over the single speaker hissed out a thin strain of opera. The room smelled of talcum powder, of liniment, of tobacco burned long ago. Along the sides were metal chairs with red leatherette upholstery that looked to have been swiped from an old barbershop. In the center, under the blinking fluorescent wheel, was a large round table topped with green felt, ringed with wooden chairs. In the far chair, directly facing me, was the old man whom I had just seen come in. He was bent over the table, a deck of cards in his hands. His face, twisted by deep canyons of wrinkles, was as skinny and as sharp as a hatchet. There was no one else in the room.

“It’s some guy with a hundred-dollar chip who says he wants in,” said Giovanni.

“Let-a me see,” said the old man.

Giovanni took the chip from my hand and let go of me
only long enough to walk it to the old man. The old man examined it carefully.

“Where did you get this?” the old man asked.

“It belonged to Zack Bissonette. I got it from him.”

“Bissonette’s dead,” hissed the old man. He put the chip into his pocket. “Dead-a men don’t have chips. It’s a club rule. I have to confiscate it. Show him out, Giovanni.”

I pulled my arm out of Giovanni’s grasp. “Wait a minute. That’s my chip. You can’t just take it and put it in your pocket like that.”

His hands, long and yellow, the knuckles swollen to the size of jawbreakers, divided the cards swiftly into two piles and gave them a loud, expert shuffle. “I must enforce the rules. I’m the president of our club. How would it look if I let-a you break the rules?” He separated the cards and gave them another loud shuffle. “Show him out, Giovanni.”

Giovanni grabbed my arm again and began to drag me, my Florsheims sliding on the worn linoleum as they headed toward the doorstep, when I said loudly, “The least you can do is let me play you for it.”

“What you got to play with?” asked the old man in his whispery voice, and Giovanni stopped dragging me.

I pulled my arm out of his grasp, shucked my shoulders, and reached up to straighten my tie. “The chip,” I said.

“It’s not-a your chip no more. I had to confiscate it.”

“I brought it, so it’s mine. Any fair club would agree to that. What I’ll agree to is to play cards with it, give you a chance to win it off me fair and square.”

“And even if that would be acceptable, it wouldn’t be enough.” The old man gave a sharp, bitter smile. “There’s a minimum buy-in.”

“How much?”

“How much you got?”

“Another fifty on me.”

“That would only cover your temporary membership dues.”

“Temporary membership dues?”

“To play you have to be a member.”

“How much are the temporary membership dues?”

“Fifty dollar.”

“But if I pay that I won’t have enough for the buy-in.”

“No. You would not.” He separated the cards again and gave them another loud shuffle. “Of course, we could work something out.”

“I have an ATM card.”

“Is that-a so? How much can you withdraw at one time?”

“Four hundred dollars.”

“Well, since you’ll be a member, four hundred dollar is how much it will take to buy in.”

“That means three hundred plus the chip, right?”

“Excuse me,” said the old man. “I must have been confused. You’ll be a temporary member only. For temporary members the buy-in is higher.”

“How much higher?”

“Four hundred plus the chip.”

“I see.”

“Plus the fifty you have on you for your temporary membership dues.”

“Five hundred and fifty dollars, total.”

“That’s right.”

“That seems pretty steep.”

He shrugged. “Don’t worry, Mr.…”

“Carl.”

“Mr. Carl.” He shuffled his cards again, loudly, perfectly, merging the two piles seamlessly into one. “It’s a friendly game. There’s a cash machine at Eighth and Catherine, two blocks away. Giovanni will walk with you. This neighborhood, you know. It’s not what it once was.”

“That’s good,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to lose five hundred and fifty dollars to a thief.”

“I understand perfectly,” said the old man, now nodding his head sagely. “While you’re gone I’ll call the other members, tell them we found ourselves a game.”