Shadow Roll (2 page)

On the north end of the island—the business end, so to speak—Lino Morelli was law.

So with us being practically brothers and me being the smart kid between us, here I was.

This was how smart Sam Russo was.  I was here but there was no twenty-five bucks a day plus expenses at the end of it.  There was no client, no money, and no credit.  This was all on Lino’s tab, and so far, all I’d ever gotten “working” with Lino was getting to read all about it in the Staten Island
Advance
.  Lino Morelli, all round great cop and homegrown hero, comes up aces.  Again.  And now this sad mess.  Lino and I never said a word between us, but we both knew I was supposed to solve it.  Like usual.  What the hell.  I’d give it my best shot, but in my heart I was already gone.  First choice: Manhattan, where, polite as a doorman and happy as a banker’s son, I’d be high stepping over sidewalk drunks.

A few minutes later me and Lino and about a dozen other SI cops were peering at the woman who’d opened the front door after Lino pounded on it.  Not only was the door engraved on my mind, so was the woman.  She was a lot older now, but then, who wasn’t?  Age hadn’t taken her down a notch.  She was still tall, wide and grim.

We all got the evil eye.  And the usual graceful greeting.

“What’s goin’ on?  Get outta here!  Don’ choo know where you are?  We got sick men in here.”

Lino said, “Now ain’t that the truth?  You wanna let us in, Flo, or you wanna — ”

That was as far as he got.  Mrs. Florence Zawadzki knew the ropes from a long life of social services and cops.  She moved aside with enough ill grace to allow us all to pass in.  In my case, it was more like passing out.  Stepping through that door was like falling down a well.  The smell alone—boiled cabbage, soiled bedding, and furniture polish—was all it took to bring me “home” again.  I stifled the words trying to come out of my mouth.  Something was trying to say: “Hello, Ma.”  Fucking ironic.  Old Flo knew as much about mothering as a cow knew about driving a cab.

I nodded at Mrs. Florence Zawadzki.  The only thing I got back was the usual dirty look.  Seems I was as welcome as ever.

Once inside, Lino never shut up.  Which got Mrs. Z so flustered and defensive, her hearing she had two dead bodies in her shrubbery, I had a chance to slip away and do a bit of sleuthing on my own.

Chapter 3

I knew every scuff mark, every initial carved in every table (I mean hell, a couple were mine), where every creak was in every floor board, every detail of every framed picture of Jesus—and every single one of ‘em the spitting image of Alan Ladd in a toga.  No getting away from Jesus in Flo’s world.  If he wasn’t watching us eat, he was watching us sleep.  I could name the rats.  OK, so they weren’t the same rats; I could name their distant ancestors.

Only the architect himself knew what he thought he was doing when he designed this heap.  This was Staten Island, not the back lot at Universal.

There’s a few things Staten Island always had enough of.  Woods and hills were two of them.  Especially on the outskirts of Stapleton.  Sometime back before the invention of bread, a load of rich do-gooders had taken over a few acres of both—someplace that’d once been someone’s farm and before that stolen from the natives by the Vanderbilts—and there, they built the Staten Island School for Children.

Growing up, I remember wondering why charity buildings all looked like prisons.  Or fortified castles.  Or haunted hotels.  Or English madhouses.  It didn’t take me long to figure it out.  Because they were.  Even if your crime was being born into poverty and then getting dropped at the door in a cardboard box.  That was Lino’s mistake.  Or having a kid for a mother.  And her raped?  Willing?  Her own father?  Her brother?  An older tough on the block?

Who knew.  Girl gets shoved in for a week, dumps the baby, gets taken away again.

That was my mistake.

In any case, I never knew who she was, where she came from or where she went.  Over the years, I’d thought about her a lot.  Wondered if she ever thought of me.  If she ever regretted leaving me behind.  Probably not.  Out of sight, out of mind.  By now she no doubt had three more brats and was living in a cold-water walk-up in Queens.  But I liked to think she made it somewhere.  Maybe even the movies.  I liked to think that a lot.

Not knowing who she was, I never knew who I was.  So, just like I made her up, I made me up, including the name.  Sam Russo, gumshoe.  And here, finally, was my first chance at a killing.

I was up all five flights of stairs before anyone noticed.

The rummy of a beat cop was right.  Every orphan in the place was crammed up here like bodies stacked in a morgue.  Beds in a row, no more than a foot between each.  Personal belongings in cardboard boxes under the bed.  A picture of Alan Ladd aka Jesus on the otherwise bare wall over each bed.  More smell of cabbage and piss, only stronger.

My headache got worse.

I was being stared at by every kid in the joint.  Staring back, I was looking for the big mouth, the kid who’d push himself forward to impress all the others, the one who’d start telling me tales.  In other words, I was looking for the kind of kid I was.  There’s always one.  Turned out this one was a girl.

“Whatchoo doin’ here?  You ain’t a cleaner or nothin’.”

I pointed at the door I’d just come in.  “Across the hall, two doors along, that was my room.  Mine and Lino’s.”

“Git outta here, Mister.  This building ain’t as old as you.”

“You kiddin’?  This place was here when Columbus showed up.”

While I was saying that, I was also moving fast towards the big multi-paned windows that looked out over where a kid like these kids had come sailing by a while back, a fully formed babe still in her belly.  Mrs. Z was down there making a hell of a racket.  In one second flat, not only me, but every other kid in the room was pressed up against the grime of old glass trying to see why.

 “Any of these windows open?” I asked loudmouth.

 “I thought you said you lived here?”

 “Times can change.”

 “Where’d you hear that?  I been here since I can’t even bemember and all the windows always been shut.  With nails.  Big ones.”

So the Zawadzkis finally got wise.  Took ‘em long enough to figure kids were using the windows, even the highest windows, to escape.

Far below, Lino was showing Mrs. Z the bodies.  In response, Mrs. Florence Zawadzki was screaming.  And would you look at that—Mr. Zawadzki was down there too.  From up here, I couldn’t tell how he was reacting, but Flo’s lesser half: caretaker, gardener if he ever bothered which he seldom did, bed warmer, and general handyman, was standing off by himself, looking on.  Flo was clutching Lino, not Mr. Zawadzki.

Back in my day Mr. Zawadzki was small but wiry; he looked smaller now.  None of us had ever known his first name.  We called him what Flo called him: Mister.  Which reminded me.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Bonnie Jean.  I’m only eight so don’t go thinkin’ nothin’ funny.”

That knocked me back on my heels.  First, because there wasn’t one thing funny about any of this.  Second, what put that in her head?  To the kid I was, “funny” meant sneaking a smoke in the store rooms behind the kitchen.  Funny could even mean hiding in the Zawadzki’s closet hoping to see something.  I don’t know about anybody else, but I never did.

I looked at her straight.  “So far, I haven’t seen anything to laugh at around here.”

A kid behind her, red hair stuck up like a whisk broom, said, “You got that right.  Who’s down there?  Is that Pamela?”

I’d opened my mouth, was just about to ask who Pamela was, but Bonnie Jean’d reached out quick and pinched him—hard.  And someone else, I didn’t catch who, hissed, “Shaddup.”

I asked anyway.  “Who’s Pamela?”

Silence.  But a lot of movement.  A lot of looking at anything but me.  A little bit of shoe scraping.  If this was a Warner Brothers cartoon, at least one of ‘em would be whistling.

Besides the pushy kid, there was always the smart kid, the one who’s got your number before you do.  Bonnie Jean was that kid too.  “You ain’t the cops.  Why you askin’?  And how come you’re up here anyways?”

All good questions.

“I’m a private detective.  I came with the cops.”

For that I was rewarded with a lot of big eyes and some happy gratified oooohs.  Which is exactly how I would of reacted back when.

Before Bonnie Jean could stop him, the redhead was tugging at my sleeve, saying, “You betcha that’s Pamela.  She was bad.  You gonna find out who kilt her?”

 “I’m here to try.  Bad?  Why was she bad?”

 Pushing him out of the way, Bonnie Jean was back in control.  “Tell you one thing, Mr. Privates Defective,” she said.  “Ain’t none of us gonna help you.  Are we?”  With that last crack, she gave the rest an eye as evil as Flo on her best day.

I knew the answer, but I had to ask anyway.  “And why is that?”

“Because we gotta live here, and if you ever really did, you don’t now.”

Chapter 4

I’d guess most of the kids who’d ever lived in the Home knew how to get up on the roof.  I’d been out of this place since Bold Venture won the Kentucky Derby—when was that? fifteen, sixteen years?—but its secrets were still mine.  They had to be.  You spend your whole life in a neighborhood, a small town, a building big enough to house the New York Yankees, that place is yours.  You know it better than you know yourself.  Its secrets are your secrets.  Especially if you’re a kid like I was a kid, always poking around.  Except for the queasy stomach when it came to slaughter, I was born to be a gumshoe.  And one thing I knew now, knew as sure as I knew Mister had a recent hairpiece—the girl’s name was Pamela and every kid in the Staten Island Home for Children knew who killed her.  And why.  I also knew not one of them was going to tell me.

All I had to do was know what they knew—which I was going to have to find out all by myself.

The roof was exactly as I remembered it.  Aside from the towers, there was a whole lot of steeply angled tiled roofing a kid could kill himself sliding off.  Up here there were four small areas of flat tar paper, each section set beside the four huge cone topped turrets.  On these, in hot weather, you had to choose your way carefully or risk getting sticky black goo all over your shoes.

Shoes were hard to come by, harder to keep.  A kid guarded his shoes.

The weather wasn’t hot.  It was cool and the tar was firm.  But not all that firm.  Up here there were footprints dating back to the Pleistocene.  What I was looking for were footprints dating back a week, maybe even a week and a half ago.  A week or so was just about enough time.

Sixty feet below, Lino, Mrs. Z, Mister, and entourage were heading back into the house, leaving the guys who cleaned up to clean up.  If I knew Lino, right about now he’d be thinking about having a look up on the roof, see if he could spot where the girl was pushed or got dropped or fell.  By now, he might know her name and he might not.  He might think of talking to the kids and he might not.  But he was sure to be headed my way.  I had maybe five minutes to myself.

Nothing but pigeon toes going every which way and seagull shit up here.  No cigarette butts or spent matches.  No scraps of torn clothing.  Not even a bloody saw.  The sound of Lino and Co. was getting louder.  I needed to get farther out on the roof without messing with stuff already there.  A plank would be perfect.  There wasn’t any plank.  But there was an old window, left leaning against the bit of wall at the top of the ladder that ended at a door opening onto the roof.  I grabbed it fast, set it down on the tarry roof and crawled out as far as I could go.  No footprints.  No handprints—wait a minute.  There was the faintest pattern on the cool tar.  I practically shoved my nose into it to get the best look.  What was it?  A board might show the grain of its wood.  The window frame I was kneeling on might leave an imprint.  It was material of some sort.  What material would leave little crosshatched marks like these?  And with that I remembered the blankets the kids were still using, old things, cheap things.  I remembered the threadbare bedspreads.  Called something—chenille?  But oldest and cheapest of all were the sheets.  What I was looking at was the imprint of a sheet.  And here and there I was also looking at indentations made by knees or elbows or both.  But not Pamela’s knees or elbows.  Even pregnant, Pamela was still a lightweight kid.  These were made by someone heavier.  And perhaps made even heavier by carrying a couple of someones smaller—like Pamela and her unborn babe.  In the shallow indentations were little spots of dried blood.  No doubt seeped through the sheet.

Later today some sort of cop would be up here scraping it off the tar paper and slipping flecks into an envelope.  But not me.  I needed a moment to think.  None of the poor kids trapped below me had the strength to carry one of their own up the ladder to this roof, much less to crawl with her to its edge.  And since it was impossible to spread out a sheet unless you could leave the body nearby while you did all this spreading, the sheet had to be here before any of that happened because there wasn’t any “nearby.”

The sheet proved planning and planning proved premeditation.

I had the old window propped up where I’d found it, and was back down the roof ladder and out of sight in a linen closet before Lino and his mob were climbing up it.

OK.  There’d been a sheet spread out on a flat bit of roof, the bit that ended in the five-story drop into sumac.  There wasn’t a sheet there now.  To have one ready and then to remove it had to mean the killer lived here, or at least worked here.  Or—hell.  I suddenly remembered all those wounded GIs down on the lower floors.  Could it be some sick creep who’d knocked up a kid and then got rid of her?

I was out of the closet and down the stairs in seconds flat.  In this game, I had to move fast.  Lino was not only dumb, he jumped to conclusions faster than an incoming blockbuster.

It didn’t take long to discover what should of been obvious.  Any poor schlub bedded down in the Staten Island Home for Children was here for the long stay.  As the beat cop said: none of ‘em were going anywhere, least of all up a coupla flights of stairs to molest kids.