Bad to the Bone (5 page)

In other cities, where millionaires look like millionaires, separating the low-lifes from the VIPs is no problem. But in New York the sleaze in the torn sweat suit is likely to be a vice president at Chase Manhattan, while the odd burglar wears an Yves St. Laurent jogging outfit and sports a fifty-dollar haircut. Evaluating street action is as much a part of a doorman’s job as finding a cab in the rain.

Which is why Moodrow unbuttoned his coat, exposing the worn handle of his S&W, as he approached the entranceway to 657 Sutton Place. The ancient revolver was part of the image and while the doorman, Ladislaw Wrotek, noted its presence without changing expression, he was markedly more polite to Stanley Moodrow man he usually was to strangers in cheap suits.

“Connie Alamare,” Moodrow said sharply. “Apartment 28C.” The sign said
VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED
and that applied to any cop not in “hot pursuit of a felon.” Moodrow noted the modest lobby with its stucco walls and worn, marble floor. Six fifty-seven Sutton Place was a pre-war building and the architect had reserved the luxury for the apartments upstairs. Modern buildings, where the residents live in white cubicles, have outside fountains and lobbies designed by interior decorators.

“You got to arrest her maybe?” The doorman grinned, exposing two gold teeth on the right side of his mouth. He was a big man, almost as big as Moodrow.

“What?”

“You are policeman, no? I wonder if you go to arrest Ms. Alamare.” He dragged the word ‘Ms.’ out contemptuously.

“You know her?”

“She is witch. No belong here with important people.”

“How so?”

Ladislaw Wrotek laughed shortly. “If you no come to arrest her, then you find out for own self. Don’ be worrying too much about it. She show you right away.”

“Yeah? Well, thanks for the tip.”

The woman who opened the door to apartment 28C did, in fact, resemble a witch. Wizened and ancient, she looked just like one of the elderly nuns who’d plagued Moodrow’s early education—Sister Paulinus, a legendary disciplinarian who’d turned fourth grade into a rite of passage.

A shiver traveled up Moodrow’s back, a definite presentiment of danger. “Connie Alamare,” he said in his most authoritative voice. He was hoping against hope that the apparition standing before him was the maid.

The witch stared at him for a moment. “You,” she demanded. “What’s your name?”

“Stanley Moodrow. For Connie Alamare.”

“Hey, Connie,” the old lady screamed. “C’mere.”

The woman who appeared an instant later was in her mid-forties. Wiry thin, her black hair was pulled back tight against the side of her head. In thirty years, Moodrow realized, she’d be the old lady’s twin. “Hey,
momma
,” the woman said. “This is the private eye. Remember? I told you he was coming.”

“This
strunza
is supposed to help us? This
Citrullo
?” He’s an old man.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Better I should go light a candle at St. Michael’s.” The old lady’s accent was pure Brooklyn neighborhood. She pronounced “
strunza
” as strunzzzz, leaving off the final ‘a’ entirely. “
Citrullo
” became sedrools.

“
Momma
, please. The man just got here. Don’t drive him away.”

The old lady snorted contemptuously. “You gonna find my great-grandson?”

“Maybe,” Moodrow returned evenly.

“Whatta ya mean? You gonna do it or you’re too old? Which one?”

“You called me ‘
strunza
.’ That means turd. It’s just possible I don’t wanna work for someone who calls me names in a language she thinks I don’t understand.”

“You’re
Italiano
? With that name? Moodrow?” She shook her head. “If this
chock
is Italian, then I must be Grace Kelly.”

“Now you call me an idiot,” Moodrow replied evenly.

“Enough, momma.
State citta
. Go in the back,” Connie Alamare broke in. “Remember where you are.”

The old lady, much to Moodrow’s surprise, did a quick about face, flashing a handful of white rosary beads. Connie watched her disappear, then turned back to Moodrow. “My mother,” she explained. “Maria Corrello. The whole family hates her. On Christmas they left her sitting in a nursing home with a turkey dinner from the Salvation Army. I took her out when I hit it big. I figured with enough rooms, we could stay out of each other’s way. Meanwhile, I can’t keep a maid anymore. I got money I ain’t counted, but I gotta go through the rooms with a vacuum cleaner and a dust cloth. Life plays funny tricks, ya know?”

“Funny ain’t the word for it,” Moodrow sighed.

Connie Alamare led the way into the living room. It was enormous by New York standards, twenty by thirty-five feet with fourteen-foot ceilings. The southern terrace running its length faced the heart of midtown Manhattan and would have afforded the kind of view affluent New Yorkers kill for, the ultimate status symbol, if the French doors and the floor-to-ceiling windows weren’t covered by thick gray drapes.

“I got an allergy to light,” Alamare announced. “Could you believe that? I pay a fortune for this place and I can’t open the drapes. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like throwing in the towel.”

She rolled on, but Moodrow, paying little attention, swept the living room professionally. The overstuffed furniture looked as if it had been bought by the pound. The back of the chair he sat in towered over his head. The coffee table, where Connie Alamare laid her coffee cup, was solid mahogany and heavy enough to anchor a battleship. Even the dark oil paintings, depicting various aspects of the Italian landscape, were dwarfed by their carved and gilded frames.

“You want coffee? I could have my mother bring it in.”

Moodrow shuddered. “No thanks. I’m gonna take notes here. I need both hands. Why don’t you run down the facts. Give me a feel for the situation.”

“A ‘feel’? I’ll give you more than a ‘feel.’ I’ll give you the whole damn situation.”

She rose abruptly, walking through the living room to a long hallway. Moodrow had no choice except to follow. He had a good idea of what he was going to find and the intermittent hiss of a respirator only confirmed his suspicions. The small bedroom, in direct contrast to the rest of the apartment, was bright and airy. A thin breeze curling through half-open windows flicked at sheer white curtains.

“Florence always wanted to open the windows,” Connie explained. “She liked to play outside. A tomboy. All the times I told her ‘be a lady, be a lady…’ I couldn’t even count the times I told her.”

The young woman lying on the bed was thin, but not yet gaunt, though she would be. She lay curled into a fetal position, despite the efforts of a physical therapist who straightened and exercised her muscles on a daily basis. Her eyes, wide open, stared at Stanley Moodrow without the slightest glimmer of recognition.

“She was breathing when they found her, but then she stopped. In the hospital before they identified her. They cut a hole in her throat and hooked her up to the machine.
Mannagia l’anima di che te morte
. That bastard, Craddock. I curse the souls of his ancestors.”

Moodrow watched Florence Alamare’s chest expand and contract in obedience to the push of the air from the respirator. He’d seen people in similar conditions, victims of gunshot wounds or savage beatings.

“See how they feed her now? They drilled a hole, then put a tube right into her stomach. I pour the food in twice a day. It’s a liquid. Thick, like syrup. They say she can keep her weight up, but look how she’s growing thin.”

Moodrow watched for another moment, then stepped back out of the room. There was no sense in staying there, nothing to be gained by looking at the twisted wreckage of Florence Alamare. Connie followed him, closing the door gently behind her. She didn’t say anything until they were seated in the living room again. Then her face turned to stone. “I want this bastard to pay,” she said. The words hissed like the respirator attached to her daughter’s throat. “I want to pull his heart out of his chest.”

“I’m not a mercenary,” Moodrow replied evenly. As a cop, he’d received his assignments from a higher authority. Now he could pick and choose.

Connie Alamare snorted derisively. “If I was a Sicilian, I wouldn’t need you. I’d make one phone call and Davis Craddock would already be dead. But I’m
Napolitano
. My grandfather was a tomato farmer. He used a hoe instead of a shotgun.”

“One second,” Moodrow interrupted. “I know what you want. It’s called revenge. It’s what all victims want. But I don’t do revenge. What I do is investigate. I find facts and if they point toward a criminal act, I call the cops. You hear what I’m sayin’?”

He was lying, of course. ‘Making the motherfuckers pay’ was at the core of his entire professional life. But it’s one thing to be an instrument of the New York Police Department and quite another to be a gun pointed by any citizen with the money to pay his fee. He wanted to be sure that Connie Alamare, consumed by hatred, was aware of his position.

“Okay,” Connie’s eyes narrowed. “You gotta forgive me, because I’m used to speaking the way I grew up. In Canarsie, Brooklyn. The big shot detective, Goobe, said you were a cop for thirty-five years so I figured I could talk naturally. I figured you were used to dealing with people from the neighborhoods.”

She was lying, but Moodrow didn’t mind. He leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs, allowing the case to sweep over him.

“Look, when I say I want his heart, I’m not saying you should hold the knife. Don’t forget, I already know that Davis Craddock did this to my girl, so if I wanted him to have an accident some day, I wouldn’t be hiring you to find proof. I’ll settle for taking him off his perch. I’ll settle for seeing him in handcuffs. Your job is to get an indictment. Then you can step out.”

“Ms. Alamare,” Moodrow interrupted the speech.

“Connie, please.”

“Connie, fine. Why don’t we start with the last time you saw your daughter.”

“That was eight years ago.”

“Eight?” Moodrow allowed the surprise in his voice to encourage her to open up.

“You know what I do for a living?”

“I don’t. No.”

“I write books about slave girls who marry princes and live happily ever after on yachts in the Mediterranean. I started reading these kinds of books when I was twelve years old. It was my escape from Canarsie. From a papa with heavy hands. From a mama with a nasty tongue who prayed five hundred rosaries a week. From the
gumbah
who wanted to lift my skirts in the hallway of St. Agnes and who I eventually married and who had hands as heavy as my father’s.

“I must’ve read five thousand romances, before I sat down and wrote one. Florence was eleven years old and my husband, he should rot in hell, was dead. I was back to living with my family. They were very old-fashioned, so it was expected that a daughter with no skills and no husband would move back into her parents’ house. I suppose that if they died, I would’ve been taken in by my sister, but I didn’t wait around that long.

“It was a nightmare in that house. My parents didn’t talk to each other. They talked to me and to Florence. They screamed their complaints and they complained about everything and everyone in their miserable lives.

“After a couple of years, I was desperate. I would’ve done almost anything, but I was an ex-housewife with a high school education and no kind of skills that would bring me enough money to live on my own. For most women in my class, the answer was remarriage, but I was different. I didn’t wanna lay underneath some drooling guinea just so I could call myself a wife. That’s exchanging one prison for another.

“So I wrote a book describing all the things I could never be and all the things I could never have. Of course, I didn’t really believe that I’d be able to write a book that anyone else would want to read, so I added something that I never found in all the romances I’d read. I added sex. My heroine was a white girl who belonged to a Saudi sheik. The man is a beast, but what can she do? She has to put up with his perversions, until the sheik offers a visiting British viscount a night with his white slave. Naturally, the viscount and the slave fall in love and live happily ever after. It became the new thing in romance novels. I mean the sex, of course. Me, I took a fancy name—Roberta Chamberlain—and hired an accountant to add up the money.

“If life was fair, me and Florence would’ve lived happily ever after, too. She would’ve used the money to get an education, married an artist, lived in France, had wonderfully talented babies. But you can’t escape your fate. Not me and not her. When she was eighteen, she decided she needed a psychologist and she went to one of the Hanoverians, Samuel Brooks. Only they didn’t call themselves Hanoverians. They called themselves Therapists and I didn’t have no idea what my daughter was getting into. Three months later, Florence disappeared into that prison they call a commune. The one on Ludlow Street. At first I got letters describing her wonderful new life, then she cut me off altogether. They told her that her family was responsible for all her suffering and she could save herself only by putting them out of her life.”

Connie Alamare began to cry. Not from sorrow, Moodrow noted, but from rage and frustration. “That was the last time you heard from her?” he asked calmly.

“Three years ago, I got a snapshot in the mail. On the back, she wrote, ‘Me and my son, Michael.’ That was it. No return address. I tried to reach her. I had messages delivered to Ludlow Street. I hired a private detective, a
mariulla
, a thief. He tried to muscle his way into the commune, but they kicked his ass. After that he stayed in his office and sent me bills every month. I wouldn’t say that I gave up, but I didn’t see what I could do. I accepted the fact that I wouldn’t see my daughter (or my grandson) until my daughter wanted to see me. Then, about two months ago, the cops found her in a vacant lot in the Bronx. They identified her by fingerprints and I took her into the house after the doctors advised me to put her in a home. The nurse is out picking up medicine. Usually she stays with Florence every minute.”

“What was the cause of all this? What do the doctors say?”