Hot-Wired in Brooklyn (17 page)

“She all right now?”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

“I’ll have to look in on her in a while. Then I have to go to work.”

“I thought you worked the graveyard shift.”

“I was just filling in. Eight to four is my normal shift. I need to be home when Charlotte comes back.”

“Whenever that is.”

“Please, Eddie. I’ve already told you…”

“I know, I know. Are you hungry?”

“I suppose I should eat.”

“It’s decided, then.”

We drove to the Home Run Diner. Lucille was back slinging hash and serving up her deadly brown brew. She did a double-take
when I walked in with Caroline, and I did one when they greeted each other by name.

“Well, at least I know now what hospital you work at,” I said as we took the farthest booth from the door. “Which ward?”

“Pediatrics.”

“Babies, huh?”

She almost smiled. “My husband and I used to come here a lot, even before I was a nurse. Lucille has never seen me here with
another man. Not since.”

“I’m sorry. I would’ve picked another place if I’d known.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Past is past.”

“No offense, but I don’t think you mean that.”

“Perhaps I don’t. I guess I just like to think that I do.”

“You loved your husband a lot, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I miss him every day. Every minute, practically.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“It’s that obvious?”

“It’s not obvious, but I can see it.”

“You’re very perceptive, then.”

“Not really. I’m kind of in the same boat you are.”

“You lost someone you loved?”

“Yes.”

“A wife?”

“Someone.”

Lucille brought two cups of coffee, told us what else we were ordering, and went back to the counter. I drank mine, but Caroline
just stared into her cup as if it had no bottom.

Finally, I asked, “Why didn’t Charlotte want you to stay with her… at the precinct station?”

“Eddie, please…”

“She figures in this now,” I said. “I need to know.”

“I don’t understand…”

“How she figures?”

“Yes.”

“She found Teddy. Maybe he was still alive when she found him. Maybe he told her something.” The size of the exit wound in
Teddy’s chest told me he hadn’t lived long enough to say his initials, but maybe she knew something anyway. Maybe she knew
all of it. Not that she’d ever tell me.

“I embarrassed her by being there,” Caroline answered. “I always seem to have that effect. Even before our parents died in
a car accident and she became my… responsibility, my presence always antagonized her. Charlotte hates being second to anyone;
she doesn’t like to be told no; she can’t tolerate criticism or rejection. She likes to be in control.”

“She’s
out
of control.”

“You didn’t see her in the police station. How calmly and accurately she described what she’d seen. How thoughtfully she fielded
the detectives’ questions. That’s why she wanted me to leave.”

“You were cutting in on her moment.”

“That’s one way of putting it. She couldn’t fully be an adult with me there. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” I said, as Lucille delivered two plates of eggs over easy and steaming hash browns. We ate without talking and
finished at the same time. I was mopping up the last of my egg with dry toast when we came back to the subject of Teddy.

“Why is he dead?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered, and it wasn’t altogether a lie. Unless Teddy had been carrying the papers that Alberto Scarpetti
had offered me ten thousand dollars to find, the kid would’ve been more valuable alive than dead. Even if he’d had the papers
with him, he’d be worth keeping alive until
Chick Gunderson, Scarpetti’s other loose thread, was gathered up and his mouth stitched. Then they’d both be disposable. And
if Charlotte knew something as well, Scarpetti’d have no qualms about silencing her with the others. My own plan was to keep
looking for Chick, keep clear of Superman and Calamari Breath, and somehow return the missing papers to the D.A.’s office.
That would salvage Chick’s life at least, and I could get back to working on Arnold’s murder charge.

I took Caroline home just before sunrise. She talked about Jimmy and Teddy all the way back, as if they were still alive.
She talked about her husband, too, about making a pilgrimage to the barren Pacific atoll where he died. I offered to drive
her to work later, but she’d changed her mind and wouldn’t be going in. She’d stay with Mrs. Mitchell and offer what small
comfort she could. They shared the same grief now. They were sisters-in-death. Within that special sorority, Caroline would
begin to slip away from the world, to dwell more and more on the dead at the expense of the living. Dead parents, a dead husband,
a dead brother. Eventually, she’d even cut her ties with Charlotte for the sake of the dead. I could see it coming, as big
as a billboard, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

And, of course, I had my own problems. When I got home, I found a handwritten sign taped to my front door to remind me of
one of them. Gino’s perfect penmanship.

“That’s four in a row,” the sign said.

I
needed sleep, but I wasn’t up to confronting those fearsome dreams again. So I busied myself with chores for the next couple
of hours: washing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning my gun, matching my socks. The phone rang three times, and each time I let
it ring. It was either Gino howling about broken glass, or Nick DeMassio telling me he’d found Chick Gunderson’s blood-soaked
body. I was almost out of leads, almost at the end of a dead-end street bounded by high brick walls. Somehow, it all had to
turn into open road.

I ran out of busywork around ten o’clock, and sleep finally overtook me in my easy chair. My dormant nightmare roared back.
Alberto Scarpetti had the honors again, driving a railroad spike through each hand with a sledge while Calamari Breath and
Superman waited to eviscerate me with long, saw-toothed spearheads. The familiar catwalk under the Brooklyn Bridge seemed
several stories higher now, the drop more precipitous.
It would be an eternity before I hit the water, a fall into unending darkness. A hell, if not Hell itself. There’d be no telephone
to wake me up, no
goombah
gently nudging my shoulder and offering a human smile. Only phantoms, fear, and the silent, infinite night.

I awoke in a sweat, but consciousness didn’t entirely lift the fear from me. The dream seemed to linger in short, staccato
flashes each time I closed my eyes. It was more than a proximity to evil, or to ill winds. I’d become cursed somehow, and
even an exorcism wouldn’t drive the marauding demons away. Only solving an apparently unsolvable set of murders could save
me now.

My options had dwindled to a single long shot: Carlson’s demure little secretary. The kitchen clock told me it was eleven-fifteen
in the morning, meaning that I’d have just enough time to drive downtown and be in front of the Municipal Building by lunch
hour.

She came out with her coworkers, in no one’s company, bundled against a gusty wind. She crossed the triangular concrete island
occupied by Borough Hall and crossed again onto Fulton Street, passing Bickford’s and entering another, smaller coffee shop
a block further down. If she was in mourning, it didn’t show in her pert, secretarial face. Carlson’s little sex toy. She
took a front booth, right by the window, and I followed.

“You,” she hissed, before I could sit down.

“My name’s Eddie,” I said. “Yours is Phyllis.”

“I would prefer to eat my lunch in peace,” she said, looking away. I sat across from her. Beneath her unbuttoned coat was
a tweed suit. Her blond hair was styled just the way she’d
worn it that day in Carlson’s office.

“Don’t you want to find out who killed your boss? Don’t you want him put away? Whatever Carlson might’ve told you about me,
I want to find out, too.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Okay. Put aside the way you feel about me. There’s a kid at Raymond Street who needs your help, and another in hiding somewhere
in Brooklyn afraid for his life. If you help me, you help them.”

“And how am I expected to do that?”

“You knew Carlson.”

“Of course.”

“I mean, beside the fact that he was your boss, you
knew
him.” I tried to let the carnal implications of that settle in as innocuously as possible, but she jumped right at them.
Her scowl darkened, taking some of her good looks away.

“Knew?”

“Yes.”

“In the Biblical sense.”

“Yes.”

“As in ‘having his way with me after office hours.’”

“Yes.”

“You are a worm, aren’t you!”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“It’s utterly
false!
How dare you even to think it!”

“He was an unmarried, attractive man, and you’re a woman,” I said firmly, but I felt the floor slipping out from under me.

As her anger pushed her voice louder, some of the other patrons turned to listen. “Your cynicism matches your vulgarity,
Mr. Lombardi. I won’t even ask for an apology.”

“Look, I’m only…”

“You’re only trying to defame the man and shame me in the process. All right. I’ll tell you all about myself and Mr. Carlson.
And when I’m through, you can just slink out of here like the weasel you are.”

“Fair enough.”

“I got my job in the district attorney’s office six years ago. I’d only recently married, and my husband and I were both out
of work. And, yes, Mr. Carlson already
knew
me when I applied. From Juvenile Hall. He’d prosecuted me for shoplifting—quite a bit of it—two years earlier, when he was
an assistant on the D.A.’s staff. He could have had me sent to women’s prison, but he asked the judge to suspend my sentence
on the provision that I return to school. I did, graduated two years later, and when the job came up in his office, I applied.
I was prepared to remind him of my past and who I was, but he’d remembered. He hired me anyway. When he was elected district
attorney, I went with him.

“He helped me again after my husband and I had our first child, a daughter. She became very ill and we couldn’t pay the hospital
bills. Mr. Carlson did. He refused to let us repay him, never asked me or my husband for anything. Not
anything.
Do you understand?”

She waited for a response, but I didn’t have one.

“Mr. Carlson was one of the kindest men I’ve ever met,” she added in a breaking voice, as if to compound my shame.

“I’m sorry I upset you,” I said, as the waitress arrived, “and I apologize. But there are still two kids in danger. Do you
mind if I tell
you
a story now?”

I started with Carlson at the wrecking yard and ended with lunch at Fulton Joe’s. “I don’t know about any of that,” she said
stiffly and without emotion. “I can’t help you.”

“All right. Tell me something else, then. Mr. Jorgenson. Who is he?”

“A friend of Mr. Carlson’s.”

“How close a friend?”

“Are we getting Biblical again, Mr. Lombardi?”

“Okay, you don’t like my questions, but two lives are on the line here.”

“And reputations aren’t?”

“Redeeming Carlson’s reputation is a poor substitute for keeping those two boys breathing. Come on, Phyllis. Tell me about
Jorgenson… please.”

She sighed and her gaze softened. “All right.”

“So, how often did Jorgenson visit?”

“Several days a week.”

“Short visits or long?”

“About a half hour, usually, and sometimes twice in the same day. Mr. Carlson routinely postponed all appointments and staff
meetings the moment Mr. Jorgenson arrived, and he answered no calls while Mr. Jorgenson was in his office.”

“Did you find that unusual?”

“Not particularly. Mr. Carlson enjoyed visitors… most of them, anyway,” she added with a quick scowl.

“Did you ever see a phone number or address for him?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Did Carlson ever ask you to call him, mail him a letter?”

“No.”

“Did they maybe do business together? Real estate? The
stock market? Anything like that?”

“Mr. Lombardi…”

“Didn’t you ever just ask, out of simple curiosity, who he was?”

“No.”

“A man visits your boss several times every week. Everything comes to a screeching halt when he does, and you don’t have any
idea who he is or what he’s doing there? Your evasions—your lies—are gonna kill two boys. You want that?”

“Of course not. But I’m not lying.”

“Then
remember
’, Phyllis. Remember something.”

“There’s not much to remember. Mr. Jorgenson’s visits were usually quiet. The door to Mr. Carlson’s office is padded, so I
couldn’t hear talking at normal levels. Not from my desk, anyway. But a couple of times, I heard them talking excitedly about
something.”

“Something?”

“I don’t know what the topic was. I picked out words, that’s all.”

“Such as?”

“’Sissy.’ I heard that several times.”

“Mean anything to you?”

“Of course not.”

“Any others?”

“Stork.”

“Stork?”

“Or something like it.”

“The arguing…”

“Not arguing. More like animated conversation, raising
their voices, but not in anger.”

“How often did these animated conversations happen?”

“Quite rarely, and never more so than that week before he died, before his car was stolen.”

I got up to leave. “Thanks. I’m sorry I interrupted your lunch. If this turns out all right, maybe you’ll understand why I
had to ask…”

“Demeaning questions?”

“Yes.”

“And if things don’t turn out?”

“Then you’ll have another good reason to hate me.”

I
t was still early afternoon when I returned to Bensonhurst. The sky looked like gray undercoat, and that meant more snow.
I had another six hours before I set up my stakeout across from St. Margaret’s, so I stopped at Bernard’s Billiards on New
Utrecht Avenue for some nine-ball and beer.