The Secret (24 page)

Sal put a gentle hand on my shoulder and offered comfort. “Hey. She was
something.
But … me … I’d have slashed her, too.” Then he grinned. “Any time I get it in mind to whack out somebody, I’ll come to you. You did it great! Nobody’s ever going to figure out what happened to Don Cheap.”

“He set himself up for it,” I said glumly. “And she did, too.”

“They worked hard to set
you
up for it.”

“What’s next?” I asked.

“We gotta find out who and why,” said Sal.

I went back down to Philadelphia and discovered that my store managers regarded me with awe. That was a strange and unexpected development.

Maybe they hadn’t known that Chieppa had gone to Florida to kill me, but they knew he had not come back from Florida. His rented car was found in a parking lot not far from the docks at Key Largo. In his one small bag was an airline ticket from Miami to Philadelphia.

Maybe they hadn’t known that Filly was supposed to set me up for a hit, but they did know she had disappeared just as Chieppa had disappeared.

The Dade County sheriff’s office noted the finding of an abandoned automobile and returned it to Avis. They notified the Philadelphia police that a resident of that city had abandoned a car in a parking lot at Key Largo. Philadelphia notified Dade County that Chieppa had a criminal record, including one felony for which he had done time. And that was pretty much the end of that.

The disappearance of Filly O’Reilly was something else. I was asked to talk to a Philadelphia homicide detective. I sat down beside his desk, he smoked and drank coffee, I drank coffee, and we talked.

“The story is that she was your girl. That you lived together, in fact.”

“She lived in my apartment. I didn’t live there. I came there once in a while. Not an unusual arrangement, hmm?”

“Her name was not Filly O’Reilly. It was Filomena Florio. As a juvenile she did some time in the Detention Home. The boys in Vice think she may have been a hooker, but small-time and not enough to worry about. Anyway … when did you see her last?”

I sighed. “I saw her at the Homestead airport. We’d flown down there in my company plane, planning to spend a couple of days fishing out of Key Largo, where I have a boat leased. On the way down she talked about how I was sixty-one years old and she was only twenty-three and how we didn’t suit each other so much anymore.”

“Cliché,” said the detective dryly.

“Right. I was halfway relieved, to tell you the truth. I’d started to wonder how I was going to break it off with her. Anyway, she said her boyfriend was waiting for her and she was going with him. That was a shock, but I accepted it. I asked her who this boyfriend was and how he knew she’d be at the Homestead airport that evening. She said she’d called him. She said she was in love with him.”

“Who was the boyfriend? Did she name him?”

“No. But I saw him. That is, I had a glimpse of him. While I was renting a car, I saw her through the window with this guy. I was shocked. I’d suppose she’d be off with some kind of big, handsome beach boy. This guy was—well, he looked something like Fredo, Michael’s brother in
The Godfather.
”

This was true. Lou Chieppa did look something like Fredo—that is, like the talented actor who had played Fredo.

The detective frowned. “I’d like to know where they went,” he said.

Which was the end of the intervention of the law in the disappearance of Lou Chieppa and Filomena Florio. Actually, they didn’t much give a damn. You can get yourself in that kind of circumstance: where nobody gives a damn what happens to you.

But I did give a damn about why somebody had put a hit man on me.

Something hung in the back of my mind and nagged me. She’d come to me complaining that Sal was hurting her with his enormous cock. He never denied he’d had her; in fact, he said he’d paid her. So Filly—Filomena—had started out seeing Sal, then switched to me. Why?

I asked my store managers. Louise, at the store on Walnut Street, had hired Filly.

“She came from Don Napolitano. You know, the one they called Ice Cream. I think she was his girl, to tell you the truth. When he was killed, she was left without protection. Mr. Nero saw her and decided he wanted her. I mean … Mr. Cooper, she was something else again, wasn’t she? She’s missing. Does that mean she’s … dead? Did she get herself into something
too deep?
”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “What about Chieppa?”

She snickered. “‘Don Cheap.’ He came around. Listen, Filly wouldn’t look at him. What would a beautiful, sexy girl want with the likes of him?”

“Didn’t he get to be a pretty big boy lately?” I asked. It was a shot in the dark. I had no idea if Chieppa had become a big boy. Maybe the woman knew.

“Well … he tried to float the story that he was the hitter who whacked out Don Enrico—revenge for the killing of Don Napolitano. But nobody believed it. He’d have been a dead man overnight if Don Enrico’s family had believed it. They satisfied themselves for his big talk by having the crap beat out of him. It’s just possible, though, that Chieppa did have something to do with the death of Don Enrico. The Napolitano Boiardos gave him a little business. For example, the girls who work here are paying him ten bucks a week.”

“I thought I put a stop to that.”

“You did. But Don Cheap was a bully. What’s more, he was here, and you were in New York.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Same reason. He was here, and you were in New York. Hey man…”

I did a quick mental calculation. I had maybe forty employees that Chieppa could have collected “dues” from. Four hundred a week. Sixteen hundred a month. He wouldn’t have tried to kill me for that. No. Something more had to be involved.

I don’t believe in private detectives. In fact, I despise them as a breed. But I hired one in Philadelphia, a woman named Morgana Brock. What I wanted her to do was check some entries in public records. She did, and we met for lunch.

“Filomena Florio…” she said. “Also known as Filly, with various last names.”

“O’Reilly,” I said.

Morgana Brock smoked as heavily as anyone I had ever seen, even the Frenchmen I’d known in years long past. While I was having a couple of drinks, she smoked four cigarettes. Naturally she reeked of smoke.

“O’Reilly,” she agreed. “She had a telephone listed as Filly O’Reilly. I don’t know what your interest in her is, so I don’t know if you’ll care to know that she was in and out of juvenile detention centers from the time she was twelve. She grew up in the slammer, you might say.”

“Why?”

“The first time it was just for being incorrigible. Truancy and so on. Then, when she was just short of fourteen she pulled a switchblade and cut a guy, nearly killed him. So back she went.”

“So what did she do?”

“She got married.”

“Who to?”

“It’s on record. Filomena Florio, retail clerk, to Louis Chieppa, insurance salesman.”

“Chieppa…” I said, trying to seem calm.

“Insurance!” she sneered. “He was a button man of the Napolitano Boiardos.”

“What kind of record did
he
have?”

“Well, she married him when she was eighteen. It couldn’t have been much of a marriage. I get the sense they didn’t acknowledge it. She rented a place in the name O’Reilly, listed herself in the phone book as O’Reilly, and so on. As long as she looked single, they could run various scams, blackmail and the like, and in a pinch sell her as a hooker. Then about a year ago he went to jail for a year—felonious assault. He was a knife man.”

So. Since he put a knife to my throat, he’d spent a year in jail, likely for doing the same thing to somebody else.

“With Chieppa in jail what’d she live on?”

“She was married to a soldier for Don Napolitano. They take care of their own, no matter how small the guy. For a price. I can’t imagine what the price may have been.”

*   *   *

I could. I talked it over with Sal and this time with Buddy.

“The Philadelphia families are nuts,” said Buddy. “There’s no restraint down there.”

“But, hey, what did I do to them that would make them want to kill me?”

“I wondered about that,” said Sal. “Until Thursday. Thursday I think I got a clue.”

“Which is?”

“I’ve been makin’ some calls, tryin’ to find out. Thursday I talked to a Teamsters guy in Newark, one of the old Provenzano crowd. There’s been a sort of runnin’ feud between them and the Napolitano branch of the Boiardos ever since we started haulin’ our merchandise with Jersey trucks. There’s a lot of bad feelin’ in the Napolitano crowd.”

“Enough to—?”

“It wouldn’t take much,” Buddy interrupted. “Not with that bunch.”

I sighed and shook my head. “While her husband was in jail, she lived off me. But—”

“So why’d she want to kill her meal ticket?” Sal asked. “My guess would be that Chieppa talked the Napolitanos into givin’ him a big contract on you. A big contract. Retirement. And it would have been without her. That broad would never have settled in a little house in Fort Lauderdoodle and contented herself with walking her dog and playing bingo.”

“So why’d she throw herself in with the sharks to try to save Don Cheap?”

Sal grinned. “You knew her. She was one of those broads whose emotions get in the way of their judgment sometimes. Ten seconds in the water, and I bet she wished she was back on the boat. Then the first shark grabbed her.”

“So now?”

“Who knows. They know you whacked out their hitter—plus his wife. One of two things. If there’s a next time, you won’t get it from a sleazeball with a knife; you’ll get it from a big guy. Or, could be this is the end of it. How much are you worth to them, after all?”

Great! Something more to worry about.

41

LEN

When we formed the corporation my father was in his sixties. He showed no sign of slowing down, certainly none of retiring. I was not yet thirty. Vicky was in her forties, as was Melissa. Of all of us, I think I was the only one who was acutely conscious of our ages. When you are thirteen or fourteen, someone seventeen or eighteen is awesomely older than you. When you are twenty-two a person of thirty is a
little
older than you. After, say, thirty-five, you feel contemporary with anyone within twenty years of you, either way.

As I approached thirty I was happily aware that I was involved in a devoted and passionate affair with a woman eighteen years my elder. Her son, Anthony, had accepted me and visited us often. He was only ten years younger than I was and treated me like a brother—certainly not like a stepfather.

Vicky showed no sign of growing bored, and certainly she was the most exciting woman I had ever known.

She tried almost everything Cheeks sold. I remember one outfit in particular. It was fire-engine red lambskin. Bras that exposed nipples had been a staple of the business for a long time. Now we sold what were called shelf bras, that is to say, underwire bras that shoved the breasts up and out while leaving them entirely exposed. Panties with slit crotches were common by the eighties, but the red panties that went with this outfit had no crotch at all and left the entire pubic area exposed. A silver chain decorated with ornaments hung from the waistband, then disappeared between the labia, emerging from the anus where more ornaments appeared, then attached to the waistband at the rear. The sheer red stockings were held up by a red lambskin garter belt decorated with loops of silver chain. Her shoes matched. It was a Larkin design, and so far as erotica was concerned, he had outdone himself.

In fact, he was outdoing himself a bit much, of late. I guess erotic imagination has its limits. The distinction between erotic and grotesque is subtle.

Knowing the red outfit was one of my favorites, Vicky wore it around the apartment many evenings. She loved giving me access to her anytime and anywhere.

Well, what was sauce for the goose … By now we stocked erotic items for men, not just the thong briefs but blatantly lascivious straps in soft black leather that bound the male parts and either forced them to fill a tight pouch or simply to stand up, thrust forward, bare and displayed. Vicky liked those things. I wore things like that for her—rings or straps around the penis, leather cages for the cock and balls, and so on. My father had long ago banned the Arab strap, because he thought it could cause a dangerous interruption of blood flow, but they were available, and I had one. I wore it, never more than half an hour at a time. It did interfere with circulation, and the organ hardened and swelled unnaturally. We took it off before entry.

Two years after we began to live together, Vicky and I were still as horny about each other as we had been that first night.

So—

I came home one evening about seven. Vicky had been at my father’s office part of the afternoon, where she was playing an ever-bigger role in the management of the company. She had changed and was wearing a simple white-lace teddy, not one of our radically daring models. It exposed her hips and butt but otherwise was mostly modest.

She poured me a Scotch and soda as usual, and poured for herself something unusual: a glass of white wine.

“Sit down, lover,” she said. “I have to tell you something.”

I heard something ominous in her voice. I accepted my drink and sat on the couch. She sat in a chair opposite me, on the other side of the heavy glass coffee table.

“I have some news for you,” she said. She drew a breath. “To be blunt … I am pregnant.”

She was forty-six years old. I knew she took the Pill. I had seen her take it, many times. How could she be pregnant? And … was a pregnancy safe for a woman her age?

I had never said I loved her, and she had never told me she loved me.

I just sat there with my mouth open, stunned. I should have said, “How very wonderful!” or “I couldn’t be happier.”

“We don’t have to have it,” she said quietly, solemnly. “I’m not that good a Catholic.”

I shook my head. “You know my wife and I—what we did. I told you. I don’t want to do that again, Vicky. If it won’t harm you … I want to have it.”