Little Easter (11 page)

“Fuck the snow. And hey, Klein, I’m almost dry. Bring me something for my throat. Maybe I’ll knock a few bucks off the price,” the old giant burped into my ear.

“One thing O’Toole,” I didn’t let him hang up.

“What?”

“The girl’s name. Was it Azrael?”

“You been doing your homework, Klein,” I could hear him smile. “Yeah, that was the Jew cunt’s name,” he stuck the verbal knife in and twisted it. “It’s good that you done your homework. It’ll make our business easier. Be here soon!”

I got there, but it wasn’t soon. Old Volkswagens don’t like the snow. I played my one cassette of British Invasion hits twice. It might’ve had time for a third go around, but I couldn’t stand to hear “Pictures of Matchstick Men” again. Like most things in my VW, the fast forward and rewind buttons hadn’t worked in a decade. I kept pulling the new fifth bottle of Murphy’s Irish out of the sack, but no combination of bad traffic, bad weather, bad ribs and bad music could make me take a sip.

O’Toole’s block was beehive busy with snow day kids hitting up their neighbors for snow shoveling money. In one form or another every driveway and every inch of sidewalk on the street had been dug out or cleared. No, not every driveway, not every inch. O’Toole’s driveway was still a field of beaten egg whites and his sidewalk was invisible under the white snow. I didn’t like it. I don’t know why. I just didn’t.

There were two sets of footprints leading up the steps to the old cop’s door. One set was small and irregular. Probably the result of a neighbor kid fighting the accumulation, looking for snow removal work. The other set was widely spaced and deep and made by an adult foot. I’d guess a man’s foot, but what the fuck did I know from footprints. The bigger prints had come first. I could tell that much. More snow had re-accumulated in their cavities than in the small prints. I thought about the print Azrael had left in the snow outside the Rusty Scupper and then rang O’Toole’s bell.

He didn’t answer and he never would. He woud never drink the Murphy’s or throw a shot glass at his dead son’s photo. He’d never again call anyone nigger or Jew cunt or spic or dot head. He’d just rot in a grave like everyone he hated.

I opened the storm door and put some light pressure on the front door. It fell back at my touch. The hallway was dark. Not the black dark of night, but the beige-brown shadows of frayed canvas shades and deep green wallpapers that only the blind would not find depressing. I slid along the hallway expecting to find death in the kitchen. I was not disappointed.

The giant lay on his belly, head away from me, legs twisted, disheveled and still. He looked like a magic trick that someone had forgotten to finish. I flipped on the chandelier, but somehow the room didn’t brighten much. There’d be no profit in checking for signs of life, so I didn’t. Funny thing was, I couldn’t immediately make out what killed him. On my hands and knees now, I looked for clues in his glassy, opened eyes that reminded me of those on the freshly dead fishes in Sheepshead Bay.

There was blood; a hint, a trickle where his lumberjack shirt over lapped his cheap belt. When I lifted him up a bit, the hint became a flood. I stepped out of its path. He’d been belly-shot at close range. I couldn’t say how many times. A shirt full of scarlet goo sort of obscures things. I patted him down, checking for whatever it was he was trying to sell me. Unless it was an empty pocket, he didn’t have it on him. For a flicker I considered the possibility that he was bluffing, but I pushed that thought away. O’Toole wasn’t the type.

There would be cops. I couldn’t sidestep them, but I made another call first. The phone rang a few times before someone picked up. The voice at the other end was one I hadn’t heard for awhile.

“MacClough’s Rusty Scupper.”

“Johnny?” I asked out of nerves more than anything.

“How’s the ribs?” he wondered matter-of-factly.

“I’ll live,” I answered, unconsciously running my hand along the tape beneath my shirt. “You know where your old partner O’Toole’s house is?”

“Why?” McClough’s tone cooled considerably with one syllable.

“I’m there right now. I think you should join me.”

“Put that old donkey on the line,” the bar owner demanded.

“Let’s just say he’s indisposed, Johnny,” I offered sardonically, looking down at the dead man. “I’ll wait for you.” I hung up.

I sat down in the chair I’d parked in during my last trip here. I didn’t like the fact that Johnny didn’t need directions to the house. O’Toole and Johnny didn’t strike me as two guys who would’ve kept in touch. I asked the lifeless giant about that. He didn’t answer. I asked him what it was he was trying to pawn off on me and where it might be hiding? He was as mum as the fishes in Sheeps-head Bay or the ones on the Scupper’s walls. I got tired of not getting answers, so I stopped asking questions.

I wanted to do a cursory search of the dead cop’s joint, but couldn’t risk how that might look to the detectives when they showed. And they would show. Besides, I didn’t know what I was hunting for. I just looked around from my seat and saw what there was to see in the diffuse brown light. That took a quick fifteen seconds, give or take ten.

I caught myself staring at the ornately framed portrait of O’Toole’s elephant-eared kid in military dress. Something about it bothered me. I thought it might be the pain in the dead kid’s expression, but no. That had been there the first time I’d seen the photo, the first time O’Toole had hurled his shot glass at it. I kept staring.

Bang! It hit me, but with a little less force than Mac-Clough’s right fist or left shoe. There
was
something askew, but not with the photo itself No. The glass that’d covered it previously was out of the frame, missing. Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe O’Toole’s shot glass aim had improved and he’d hit his target once before passing from this earth. Or maybe it meant the glass had been purposely removed to clear some space for storage behind the dead boy’s photo.

Before dissecting the frame, I ran my fingertips over the glass-free photo. I could feel there was more behind that dead Marine’s expression than just pain. The contents poured out of the frame easily enough. Sandwiched in between the blackened cardboard backing and the snap of O’Toole’s dead son were some curious odds and sods. There was a brittle yellow newspaper clipping, a list of phone numbers (some in pencil, faded and smudged; Some in pen, bright and recent) and a couple of other photographs.

There was one old Polaroid shot of Azrael and a young, uniformed John Francis MacClough taken at some garish and probably long since bankrupted restaurant. They held hands across a Peter Max printed tablecloth. Johnny was mugging for the camera. The girl’s soul and smile were fixed on the man holding her hand. There was a head shot of just the girl. The lifeless gray hair I’d seen tucked under the ratty mink was once chestnut brown with auburn highlights in the sun. It was thick. God, it was thick; the kind of hair a man could lose a hand in, the kind of hair that came from God and not from any bottle. The dead eyes I’d seen searching the cloudy Christmas Eve sky were yellow-green crystals two decades ago. Her lips were just this side of thick and her lashes were sleek, dark feathers. Hanging against the tanned, freckled skin of her chest was a familiar heart-shaped diamond pendant. The heavy orange make-up of middle age was absent. Maybe she had less to hide back then. She was, as its said in Brooklyn, a woman to die for. Some probably had.

Behind the snap of Azrael came another photo almost identical to the one of Johnny and the girl; same restaurant, maybe even the same table. Only in this one, the chestnut-haired girl held hands with a very different man. The stud in Johnny’s shoes was modelishly handsome with curled brooding lips, sable hair, cold black eyes and a chiseled chin with a cleft that could hold a pearl. He did not mug for the camera. He would not have to. The camera loved him. Two things about Azarel were markedly different in this Polaroid; the orphaned heart was missing as was the love and admiration in her eyes.

The last photo was recent. It was oversized, satin-finished and lacked the white border of both older pictures. Unfortunately, the photographer and his subject had botched the job. The picture was blurry, overexposed, done with the wrong speed film and taken from too far away. Other than that it was perfect. This masterpiece was a side shot of a woman between the ages of twenty and thirty getting into a car. What car? What woman? I couldn’t tell you. But if this was the best shot on the roll, I’d hate to see the rest.

The yellow newspaper clipping had been cut out sans date but the print said that it came from the
Times.
The words told me mostly what I had expected. Mostly. The article recapped the events surrounding the trial of a certain mob figure. It seems that the government had failed to prove its case in spite of the compelling testimony of its star witness—Azrael Esther Wise, born Esther Wiseman in Brooklyn, N.Y. on V-E Day 1945—the paramour of the defendant’s oldest son. Nothing terribly enlightening here. I’d guessed at the greater part of this anyhow. The one surprise came in the letters that spelled the defendant’s last name: Gandolfo.

That’s right, Gandolfo. Gandolfo, as in Dante “Don Juan” Gandolfo. Gandolfo, as in Larry Feld’s biggest client. The trial had been that of Dante’s father, Roberto “The Boot” Gandolfo, and the star witness had been Dante’s girl. Sometimes the world is too small a place to suit me, much too small a place.

I flipped back to the photo of Azrael and the brooding male model holding her hand. Then I squeezed my eyes shut and recalled the blowup in Larry Feld’s office of himself, Mike Wallace and Dante Gandolfo. Add a few years, a few pounds, a little gravity, some salt to the black pepper of his hair and there’d be a match. O’Toole had told me that Johnny’s girl had been a wiseguy’s toy. Christ, MacClough could really pick them. But even here, with a bloody stiff at my feet, I couldn’t blame Johnny. In twenty-year-old pictures, she could make you want her. Believe me. She could. I wondered what kind of world it was that turned her into the orange-faced loser I found eating canary on Christmas Eve.

Before burying my new-found booty in my pocket, I spread the old news clipping out on the dead man’s table. It looked strange unfolded like that. What I mean to say is that most of the article had been neatly scissored or razored out, but one of the edges was rough, torn, uneven. The tear seemed fresh. Fresher, at least, than the cut edges. Someone had recently removed a piece of the puzzle and I didn’t have time to look for it. I heard steps crunching up the snow on the front steps.

“Dead?” Johnny asked, already knowing the answer.

“Quite dead.”

MacClough put his knee in the pool of drying blood and lifted the body just as I had. He shook his head and let the corpse back down: “Belly shot with a twenty-two. Three, maybe four times. He let the killer get awfully close to him. Asshole.”

I didn’t disagree.

“Call the cops?” MacClough wanted to know.

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“I figured we had a lot to talk about first,” I prodded.

“Is that what you figured?” Johnny was just full of questions.

“Uh huh,” I could be so articulate.

“Then you need help with your figuring,” the wary ex-cop advised. “We don’t have anything much to discuss.”

This sparring was giving me a bellyache and making me remember my sore ribs. I wasn’t much in the mood and I was getting pretty fucking tired of digging for every answer and then trying to decipher it like a hieroglyph. I laid it out for him much as I had the brittle newsprint.

“Look Johnny,” I slammed my fist on the table, “let’s stop the cha-cha. Her name was Azrael Wise and she was Dante Gandolfo’s property. Problem was, she didn’t love him. She loved you. But ‘Don Juan’ wasn’t an easy guy to walk away from, especially after she’d seen things. She’d seen the kinda things that get some people a half-dozen consecutive lifetimes in stir. She’d seen the kinda things that get other people to swallow bullets. Anyway, she rolled over on Dante’s old man. I suspect with a big push from a chesty, rookie cop who was sure he knew what the right thing was,” I cleared my throat. “Stop me when I get cold,”

He didn’t stop me.

“So, with you pushing, she witnessed against Robby ‘The Boot.’ And that was that. Azrael was
persona non grata
everywhere on this planet murder could reach. She bid adieu to Johnny Blue, riding off into the sunset on the back of the Witness Protection Program. But the program wasn’t so sophisticated then like it is now. Now they use fake social security numbers and fabricated identities. When Azrael went underground, they used the identities of people who didn’t have much use for ‘em anymore. You know, people like a little dead girl who drowned while her big sister watched,” I was shouting now. “People with names like Carlene Carstead, for instance.”

He still didn’t stop me.

“You’re in this shit, MacClough, up to your guilty nipples and I’m tryin’ like hell to pull ya out. Don’t even tell me ya don’t want my help,” I waved off any potential objection. “You’re gettin’ it.

“Now I know you didn’t whack Azrael and I don’t think you whacked Mr. Pinky Ring either. Ya might have, if you’d gotten the chance. I just don’t think ya got that chance. Him,” I shrugged at O’Toole’s nearly forgoten body, “maybe he was squeezin’ ya. Maybe ya had to quiet him. But even if ya didn’t, you’re gonna kill. I can smell it on ya like my father’s cheap aftershave on Sunday mornings. I don’t know that I could stop ya, but I figure to try.

He shook his head from side to side: “You still need help with your figuring.”

“You help me,” I pointed at him accusingly. “You help me make sense outta this. Why’d she come outta hiding after all these years? Christ, the old man wasn’t even convicted and he’s not head of the family anymore. The contract on her must’ve been colder than Candlestick Park in July. Why now, Johnny? Why now?”

“We got nothin’ to talk about, Klein, except maybe the weather.”

“Okay, MacClough, the cops are gettin’ called,” I moved for the phone.

“Yeah and so what happens?” the ex-detective seemed less nervous about the cops’ arrival than the dead man at his feet.