Hot-Wired in Brooklyn (21 page)

I decided not to talk to him about white men’s movies for a while.

I took the IRT line to Times Square, switched to the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit system, and went home to Bensonhurst. I snuck
in the back to the sound of a rooster crowing in the cold, took one look out the kitchen window to be sure the Barracuda Brothers
were still in place, and climbed into the Murphy bed. It was Sunday morning. I was going to miss mass at St. Margaret’s and
several precious hours of consciousness, but I didn’t care.

I
slept without the dreams, well enough, in fact, to wake up fully rested at eleven. I started making lasagna. Tony and Angelo
came by at one, but Gino called a half hour later to beg off. His youngest, Gloria, had come down with a cough and cold, and
he was staying home with Gina to take care of her. It was going around, he said.
Lots
of bad stuff was going around.

Sal and Frankie arrived with the garlic bread and beer, Schaefer this time. Nobody argued or mentioned my wedding, and the
hours slipped by agreeably with a low-stakes poker game and the familiar sounds of the radio.

I called the hospital to check on Liam, but he’d been released Saturday. I wasn’t ready to go all the way to Canarsie, but
I
was
ready to watch Jorgenson and the redhead again. I left my
goombahs
with the remains of the lasagna, took Sissy’s picture file from the wall safe in my office, and went out the back way. I
stopped at Gino’s to check in on little Gloria and
to borrow Gino’s car for the evening. When I arrived at Fourth Street in the Village, it was just getting dark. Back in Bensonhurst,
the Barracuda Brothers were just starting to get cold.

The Jorgensons stayed put. No frantic trips to Chinatown or anywhere else. I stayed put, too, resisting the temptation to
confront them with the pictures. I fell asleep in the car sometime after ten and didn’t wake up until morning.

The sound of Jorgenson’s fancy car was my alarm. I followed him all the way back to Brooklyn, to a lot near Times Plaza downtown.
From there he walked into the Williams-burgh Savings Bank Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the borough. He knocked on the
bank’s big plate-glass door, a security cop let him in, and I waited outside. When the bank opened, I stepped almost reverently
into its cathedral-like ambiance.

I checked the tellers’ cages and the managers’ desks, but I couldn’t see Jorgenson or his nameplate, so I finally asked one
of the guards. I gave him my card, he briefly disappeared, and a few minutes later Jorgenson came out of a private office.
Three-piece suit, hair combed and parted neatly on the left. He scrutinized me a moment, then said something to the guard
and returned to his office. The guard motioned me ahead.

The gold lettering on the door said,
BANK EXAMINER
. An official-sounding voice called to me and I walked in.

“Ah, Mr. Lombardi! Close the door, please,” he said from behind a desk that was only a little smaller than the one in Carlson’s
office. But Jorgenson wasn’t hiding behind it. He was calm, smiling, and easy, as if the world belonged to
him.

“I guess I’m at a disadvantage,” I said, stepping forward.

“That I recognize your name? Easily explained. My brother spoke quite a bit about you.”

“Your brother?”

“Jack… Mr. Carlson.”

“The D.A. was your
brother?”

“Half-brother, actually, but we never quibbled about that. Our mother never did either, for that matter.”

“At the funeral… You weren’t in the official party.”

“That’s the penalty for our illegitimacy. My sister Sissy and I.” He smiled without embarrassment and offered me a chair.
“We’re twins, you see.”

“Twins?”

“Fraternal.”

“You look a little older.”

“That’s because I act the part of protective big brother so well. With Sissy, that’s an absolute necessity. Yes, we’re twins.
Mr. Carlson, Senior, our mother’s dear, depraved, all-controlling banker-husband, would have never permitted his poor wife
more than a single romantic fling outside his dreary bed.”

“How come you’re being so direct with me?”

“Because I know you’re going to ask. Jack said you ask a lot of questions. So did Mr. Lao.”

“Mr. Lao?”

“The other night in Chinatown. You and the large Negro. Lao’s still very upset about his front door.”

“So you know…”

“Only what Jack had told me, and that you’ve been following Sissy and me ever since the funeral. In two different
cars. Very professional.”

“Anything else you want to volunteer… before I ask?”

“About?”

“Why’d Shork pick your sister to blackmail?”

“You know about that?”

“Uh huh. Why her? Why not you?”

“Indeed? Why me?”

“No offense, but your sexual inclinations, maybe. That’s always a good reason.”

“You have proof of same?”

“No, but…”

“But I’m convincing in the part, if it
is
a part.”

“Something like that.”

“It’s true that I follow the great Oscar Wilde in my sexual appetites, but I am discreet. Sissy, alas, has never been.”

“I have the pictures,” I said, producing the folder from inside my coat.

“Of?”

“Sissy. From Shork’s collection.”

“That’s not possible. Not unless you lied to my brother about his briefcase. You told him you found it empty.”

“I did. That night at the wrecking yard, your brother was paying Shork for pictures of Sissy.”

“Pictures
and
negatives. And you don’t have
those
pictures?”

“No, others.”

“Not possible. Shork told me that they were the last…”

“You’d paid Shork five times before, fifteen thousand dollars, all totaled…”

“How did you know that?”

“…And he was ready to hold you up for more, and to keep holding you up.”

Jorgenson’s eyes turned harsh as he stared at the folder. “So now I am to deal with you,” he said sadly. I tossed it across
the table.

“Wrong again. Except for the pictures in the briefcase, and I don’t know where those are, this is the end of it. I promised
your brother I’d destroy them myself, but maybe you’d feel better doing it.”

The moment he looked at the picture, he began to cry. He got up, still sobbing, and walked to the window. I waited until he
collected himself before I continued. “I hope you’ll accept what’s in that folder as my favor to you, and I hope you’ll do
me one in return.”

He eyed me cautiously for a moment, and then he said, “What do you want?”

“The story. All of it that you know.”

He slumped at his desk, flicked a button on his intercom and said, “No calls.” He studied my face for a moment before he spoke
further. “Sissy… is not quite right, as the doctors like to say. Since birth. Our father had only the briefest affair with
the unhappily married Mrs. Carlson. His name was Arthur, or so I was told years later. He was an artist, very bohemian, very
handsome and witty, but he had emotional problems which he passed, for the most part, on to Sissy. Neither of us ever met
him. Jack even tried to track him down once, without success. Poor Arthur either went mad somewhere or Jack’s father had him—how
shall I say this nicely—eliminated. Sissy and I are similarly dead as far as Jack’s father, the great tycoon, is concerned.
He supported us,
grudgingly, at our mother’s insistence. Such a cruel, heartless, petty man. I’m ashamed to be in the same business.”

“I’m assuming he hasn’t changed much over the years.”

“No. There have been times when even Mother could not force him to support us, to acknowledge our needs. That’s when Jack
fought for us, fought against his own father, for
us.”

“And Sissy’s trouble?”

“As I said, she’s not quite right. Call her dull-witted, irrational, flighty, gullible in the extreme. It’s what the doctors
say. Anyway, she’s spent most of her life being a victim of
something.
The boys in Sissy’s grammar school were her first tormentors. They abused her, emotionally at first, and then, when they
found out how easy it was, sexually. After she was gang-raped in the eighth grade, Mother took her out of school. It was an
elite private school, and many of the guilty boys were the sons of men who worked for or with Jack’s father, or knew him from
his club, so the whole business was hushed up. Nobody admitted to knowing that the Jorgenson twins were really half-Carlsons,
but most of them knew. We could barely control Sissy after the rape. She discovered alcohol, Benzedrine, and her own sexuality
almost simultaneously. Jack came to her rescue time and again, and the two of us begged her to get the psychiatric help she’d
been refusing. The only person she’d accept counsel from was Jiang, whom Mother had secured as a companion when Sissy was
very young.”

“She waits tables at Lum Fung’s on Canal Street?”

“Yes.”

“But Jiang couldn’t watch her day and night…”

“Precisely. It was a party somewhere. She’d gone unchaperoned, or perhaps her escort was in on it as well. She became drunk,
they took her to a room, and took their pictures. Sissy didn’t care, but it was a scandal to the rest of us, especially Mother.
The pictures came somehow to Shork, who bled us dry, until that night at the wrecking yard. The last pictures, he promised.
The very last.” His voiced trailed away, and he stared blankly at me for a moment, his attention waning, his thoughts scattering
like children at recess. I was afraid I’d lose him, so I posed my other question.

“What hold did Alberto Scarpetti have on your brother?”

“Do you know the Faust legend? A man who makes a fatal bargain with the Devil?”

“A little.”

“Transpose it to Brooklyn, substitute Scarpetti for the Devil, and you have my brother’s story.”

“’A critical lapse in judgment, leading to a series of bad decisions and crowned by an act of sheer recklessness.’”

“What’s that?”

“It’s something he said to me a couple of days before he died. You knew his whole case against Scarpetti was in that briefcase,
didn’t you?”

“And if I did?”

“Then you made the same deal he made. I mean, with your soul.”

That brought a cold stare. He stood up and walked to the window again. After a few moments, he answered. “I chose my brother
above the law. That’s all. I made no deal with the Devil.”

“You aided and abetted. You helped your brother give the
Devil his due, and then some. If those documents don’t reappear and convict Scarpetti, you’re going to have even more blood
on your hands than you have already.”

That turned him around. “Already?”

“That’s right.”

“And whose blood is that?”

“You were in such a hurry to be honest before. Why not be honest now?”

“About what?”

“About
whom.
Joe Shork.”

“Shork?”

I stood up. “You want to tell me why you killed him?”

J
orgenson fled his office so quickly that he slammed his shoulder into the doorjamb. He wasn’t going far without an overcoat,
so I followed him casually into the lobby. He waited for the elevator with some agitation, and when he got in with five other
people, I got in, too. We glared at each other across the car as the operator closed the door.

We went up.

The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower had several observation decks. Jorgenson took the first, probably because no one else
was on it. I followed him out.

“You’re out of your mind,” he said as he looked down on Times Plaza.

“If I am, why are we up here?”

He turned to face me, eyes set coldly. “I needed some air.”

“And maybe a good spot to jump?”

“Or perhaps to throw you over.”

“No offense, Mr. Jorgenson, but I could handle you from a wheelchair.”

“Your accusation is absurd.”

“No it isn’t. Think about it the way I have, ever since you tipped me.”

“Tipped you?”

“Yeah. You were in the car that night your brother was dealing with Shork. You didn’t hear Shork say anything about those
being the last pictures.”

“Jack came out to the car and told me.”

“No he didn’t. He went to get more money for the negatives, but he didn’t say a word to you, and Shork didn’t, either, because
you were never inside the shack that night. That’s what Arnold, that kid in Raymond Street says, and, strangely enough, I
believe him.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“So, what’d you and Carlson do after Arnold swiped the car? Call the cops from right there, then call a cab?”

“Jack had me call, but then we took the subway back to Flatbush. Jack was afraid to be recognized.”

“Did Shork know the Scarpetti file was in the car?”

“Of course not. He thought the entire incident was quite amusing, especially when I was thrown into the street. He had his
money, you see. He had no further interest.”

“Another reason for you to frame Arnold. Payback for throwing you into the street.”

“Nonsense. The boy killed Shork. He made a public threat in City Prison.”

“Not all that public. Only the desk sergeant, a couple of guards, some stray felons, and a lawyer friend of mine heard it.
That’s how I knew, and from the police report, which isn’t public. The only way
you
could’ve known was from your brother, who was paying very close attention to everything Arnold said or did at Raymond Street.
He needed that briefcase back in a hurry, before anybody else knew it was gone. You were helping him on that, but then you
realized you could kill Shork, frame Arnold for it, and save your sister from any more blackmail. You were even prepared to
jeopardize your brother’s search for the briefcase to get Sissy free of Shork permanently. That’s why you went back to Victory
Wrecking the night after they released Arnold. That’s when Shork told you there were no more pictures except the ones in the
car. He probably said it with a sly little grifter’s smile, just to put a doubt in your mind, to watch you squirm a little
more. Maybe he was even laughing. And then you hit him as hard as you could with Arnold’s hammer when his back was turned.”