The Black Stiletto (5 page)

Yes, he was planning it. I saw it in his face and eyes. That intuition again. The wild animal’s instinct to protect itself.

I had to flee.

For three more horrendous months I endured existing under
the same roof with that evil man. At the end of January 1952, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore.

I got hold of a bus schedule. I figured out how to get to the Odessa station in town and how much money it would cost to go somewhere far away. I packed a knapsack with some clothes and necessities. Then on a Sunday morning when my mom and Douglas were sleeping late, I crept into their bedroom. I could do that well. I called it “sneaky-weaking.” Like a cat, I could open doors and go in and out of a room without making a sound.

So I sneaky-weaked into the room and grabbed Douglas’s billfold, which was sitting on the nightstand by his side of the bed. He’d been paid the Friday before, and I knew his routine. He always cashed his check for the full amount, went for a drink at one of the roughneck bars, then came home with a wad in his wallet. On Monday he used it to pay bills, give some to my mother, and maybe put a little in the bank.

But this was Sunday.

I counted two hundred and fifty-two dollars in his wallet, so I took it and replaced the billfold. There was another hundred and twenty-five stashed in his nightstand drawer. I had managed to save a hundred dollars of my own money, so I thought I was rich. I had no idea how quickly that amount of cash would slip away out in the
real world
. But I didn’t think about it, and I wouldn’t have cared if I had.

I grabbed my knapsack and left the house. Caught the bus at the end of the block and rode it downtown. I didn’t know where I wanted to go from there, so I studied the big board and the names of all the various cities. New York sounded the most exotic, so that’s what I chose. I boarded the next bus to New York City and left behind my home, my brother, my mom, Texas, and that sick creep Douglas Bates.

As soon as I was in my seat, I vowed that one day I would get revenge on the bastard for what he did to me.

4
Roberto
T
HE
P
RESENT

My goddamned heart nearly stopped when I heard the guard shout, “Ranelli! Roberto Ranelli! Your ride’s here!”

Holy Mother of God.

I’ve been waitin’ for this day for fifty-two fuckin’ years. Sittin’ in this rathole all that time, gettin’ old, just tryin’ to survive. I knew they couldn’t keep me in here until I died. I always thought I’d see the outside again.

They gave me some street clothes to put on. Some trousers that barely fit, a clean white shirt, and a dumpy sport jacket. I don’t know where they got ‘em. Probably some thrift shop in Ossining. Or maybe there’s some kind of shitty charitable organization that provides civilian threads for parolees. Hell, I don’t know. I don’t care, either. I just wanted to get the fuck out of here.

The guard known as “Red,” because of his flamin’ red hair and freckles, approached my cell and gave the signal to the operator down the hall. No keys in this place, not anymore. Everything is automated. Run by computers. Amazin’ inventions, those computers. When I first got sent up the river, there were no such things. They were science fiction. I’m glad I got to learn how to use one in the prison library. I witnessed the evolution of computers in that stinkin’ library. I remember the first one they had was a stupid Apple IIc. We all thought it was a marvel. I think that was in nineteen eighty-four or somethin’. By 1990 we had
real PCs that ran on DOS. Yeah, I learned what DOS was and how to manipulate it a little bit. Then Windows was the next big thing. Then things really started to explode. Computers got more sophisticated, faster, and smaller. Now we got these Macs in the prison library. Pretty nice machines. Hold on—
we
don’t got ‘em.
They
got ‘em. I’m outta here. I’m fuckin’ paroled. After fifty-two years. Unbelievable.

The bars slid open and I walked out. “Thanks, Red,” I said.

“Sure thing, Ranelli. We’re gonna miss you around here.”

“Red, I was here before you were born.”

“I know. You’re like my goddamned uncle or somethin’.”

“Take care of yourself, Red.”

“You too, Ranelli. Just go on down to Roscoe, there, and he’ll escort you to where you gotta go.”

“Thanks.”

As I walked down that hall of cells, guys I’d become friends with—and enemies, too—they all said goodbye and good luck. I waved and smiled at them. I didn’t want to stop and talk. I didn’t want to draw it out. Fuck ‘em.

Roscoe was one of those stone-faced guys who’d been there forever. The place had some friendly guards, but most were coldhearted assholes who didn’t give a shit about you. Roscoe was one of those.

We went through a series of doors that opened and closed as a buzzer sounded. I passed Julio, another lifer who’d been in since the early seventies. He was paintin’ a wall or something, some kind of work detail he was on.

“Hey, old-timer,” he said. “You really leavin’ us, huh?”

“Better take a good look at my ass when I walk out,” I answered. “It’s the last you’ll see of it.”

“Take care, Roberto.”

“Thanks, Julio. You, too.”

“Wish it was me, man.”

“It will be someday. Don’t give up.”

“Right.”

We went through another couple doors and finally entered the office where they gave you the official send-off. I’d already filled out all the paperwork, got it signed and approved and everything. There wasn’t much more that needed done.

Some ancient guy—probably a lifer even older than me—worked the unit where they kept prisoners’ personal belongings. Sing Sing had over two thousand inmates, so there was an awful lot of junk in there. I often wondered what they did with the crap that belonged to guys who died in prison. Did the guards use it for currency and play poker with it?

I signed the paper and they handed over a little plastic bag. Inside was my wallet I’d had in my pocket when I was arrested. Damn, it looked just like new. I opened it up and found my old driver’s license, fifty years out of date. A business card from my bank with an account number scribbled on it. A few black-and-white pictures of my mother and father, and one of my brother Vittorio.

Vittorio. He would’ve looked just like me now if he’d lived.

There was also a comb, a wristwatch that didn’t work anymore, a tiny notepad, a key ring, and a hundred and three dollars and sixty-two cents. That was the amount of money I had on me at that stupid New Year’s Eve party. I stuffed the money into the billfold and stuck it in my pocket. The comb I shoved in my back trouser pocket. The wristwatch was useless, so I dropped it in the trashcan by the counter. I picked up the notepad and flipped through it. It had some names and addresses in it. At first I didn’t remember why I’d had it. Then it came back to me. It was my little black book, so to speak. I was never good at rememberin’ addresses and phone numbers, so I carried that little notepad around with me. The key ring—that was somethin’ I needed. There were three keys on it. One opened my old apartment and
another was for my long-gone Studebaker—those were garbage now—but the third key was important. I slipped the bad keys off the ring and tossed them in the trash. The good one I kept and put in my pocket.

“You need me to call you a cab?” the old man asked.

“I thought they said my ride was here.”

The guy looked confused. “You had a ride comin’ for ya?”

“No. I think it was just an expression.”

“Oh. So you want me to call a cab?”

“No.”

The geezer shrugged. His eyes looked me up and down. “How long you been in here?”

“In
here
? Sing Sing? Or how long has it been since I was arrested?”

“Whatever.”

“I was arrested New Year’s Eve—er, rather, early New Year’s Day, nineteen fifty-eight.”

The guy whistled. “How old are you, man?”

“Seventy-eight.”

“No shit? You look pretty fit. I’d have said you were sixtysomethin’.”

“Thanks. I guess.”

“And they didn’t parole you sooner? How many people did you kill, anyway?”

“I was convicted for one.”

The guy nodded. He knew there were more. “You’re lucky, man. Most lifers stay lifers. How’d you avoid the chair?”

I shrugged. “Had a good lawyer, I guess.”

“Must have.” He winked at me. He, too, knew I was connected at one time. The family had good attorneys with judges in their pockets. “You’re a legend around here, Roberto.”

“Better that than a fossil.”

“Well, good luck to you.”

“Thanks.”

The doors opened.

I was free.

I walked out into the sunny streets of Ossining, past the shell that was old Sing Sing, the original prison that was declared some kind of historical buildin’. What a crock. A historical monument to pain and sufferin’ and death. I heard they were gonna make it a museum. They closed it in the forties. Thank God it was before I got in. It was supposed to be really awful. The so-called modern facility was horrible enough. I’d seen a lot in Sing Sing. I knew guys who did the sit-down dance. They finally abolished execution by the chair, thank goodness. I was there for the riots of eighty-three, but I didn’t participate. I knew better. I stayed the hell out of the way and made sure the guards saw I wasn’t doing anything. That went a long way toward improvin’ my conditions. I got offered more work/program assignments. My days of bein’ the prison badass stopped after my first twenty years, so I became known as a “model prisoner.” It took forever, but it got me paroled. Good behavior. And age. The heart murmur probably had somethin’ to do with it, too. The prison doctor told me to have it checked out by a cardiologist when I got out.

Screw that. I had more important things to do with what time I had left on this stinkin’ planet.

Like finding
her
.

The cab took me all the way down the FDR Drive to lower Manhattan. The driver was some Arab guy wearin’ a turban. I didn’t expect that. Luckily, he wasn’t a talkative type, ‘cause I didn’t feel like chattin’. Man, things sure had changed. I hardly recognized the city. Well, parts of it were exactly the same. The skyline was different. More buildings. I wish I’d seen the Twin Towers. They were built and destroyed all durin’ the time I was up the river. Do
they still use that expression—“up the river”? It came about because you had to go up the Hudson to get to Sing Sing. There are probably a lot of expressions people don’t use anymore and many more they do use that I don’t know about. It’s gonna be a learnin’ curve. Will I reenter society smoothly? I had to attend some seminars in the joint that were supposed to help me “reassimilate.” They didn’t teach me a damn thing. Most of it was common sense. They told us about how technology had advanced, what we could expect when we tried to do somethin’ as simple as makin’ a phone call. Again, computers had changed the world. One of the first things I wanted to do when I got my dough was buy one of them laptops. I needed to get online. And I had to find some of my old friends—ones who were still alive, if any.

I told the driver to let me off at the corner of Wall Street and William. I paid him and then looked up at the buildin’ I’d been dreamin’ about for fifty-something years. Imagine my shock when I saw it. Forty-eight Wall Street was completely different. It was supposed to be the Bank of New York. It had changed. It wasn’t a bank anymore.

What the hell had they done with my stuff?

I felt my heart skip a beat—that damned murmur thing again—but I took a deep breath and told myself to relax. They weren’t gonna throw out anyone’s money. The bank probably moved. So I went inside. The lobby was now some kind of museum of finance. I walked up to some guy that looked like he worked there.

“Yes, sir, can I help you?” he asked.

“Where’s the bank that used to be here?”

He looked confused.

“The Bank of New York.”

“Oh. You’re in the wrong building. You want to go to One Wall Street.”

“One Wall Street?”

“That’s the Bank of New York. Actually it’s now the Bank of New York Mellon.”

“Mellon?”

“They merged. A few years ago.”

“I see. Would they have all the stuff that used to be in this building?”

The guy shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Thanks.”

I wondered if I should call my lawyer’s office. They’re the ones who’ve kept the trust money that paid the rent on my safety deposit box all these years. Wouldn’t they have told me if my bank had changed? Maybe not. Fuckin’ lawyers.

I left the place and started walkin’ toward Broadway. It was a minor miracle I remembered where certain streets were and what direction they were in. Some things never leave you. Manhattan’s in my blood. I lived here all my life.

And the women. My God, the women. They sure were different. I mean, they were still
women
, but sweet Jesus, were they amazin’. Short dresses. Long bare legs. Some had tattoos! Blondes, brunettes, redheads. All nationalities. Young, middle-aged, old. They were all fuckin’ beautiful. I didn’t see many women in the joint. I thought I’d have a heart attack right there on the street.