Hot-Wired in Brooklyn (16 page)

Calamari Breath opened the car door with a satisfied smile and balled up his fist as a promise of future encounters. He and
Superman drove a short distance and parked. A goon in a three-piece blue suit met me at the door.

“Nice,” I said. “Salvation Army or fire sale?” He studied me like I was something he might want to step on later, then said,
“This way.” Another goon, on the leaner side, watched me from the foot of a grand staircase. When I stopped to watch him back,
the suit said, “Keep walkin’.”

The solarium at the back of the house overlooked the bay, but all I saw was steamed glass and a blurred snowfall behind it.
Alberto Scarpetti was resting in a lounge chair surrounded by exotic plants. A tropical paradise in the middle of winter.
Only the very rich could manage it.

“Lombardi,” he said when he saw me.

“That’s right, Mr. Scarpetti,” I answered with my best manners. He pointed to a deck chair and I sat down as he
waved my scowling, blue-suited escort into the hall.

“Drink?” he asked. “Highball. I make ’em good.”

“No, thanks.”

He poured one for himself. He had a round, tight-featured bulldog face topped with thick, wavy, antique-white hair. His body
was short and stocky, but it didn’t bulge anywhere and it still had muscle. In this artificial setting, he looked more like
an actor playing a tough guy, but his savage reputation was real enough. He was a bona fide murderer, with a murderer’s pride.

“I got a call the other night,” he said suddenly, casually. “It’s a kid. A teenager. He tells me he’s got somethin’ I want,
and he wants money for it.”

“How’d he get your phone number?”

Scarpetti glowered at the interruption. “It’s in the
book.
So, this kid, he calls me. I listen. The kid’s scared silly. I can hear it in his voice. And he wants money from me. Imagine
that. He’s doin’ the extortin’, and
he’s
scared.”

He waited for me to comment, but I stayed silent.

“You know about all this, don’t you, Lombardi?”

“I think I know who the boy might be.”

“Does he know he’s playin’ with dynamite?”

He studied my reaction to the word. “I don’t think he knows how much.”

“But you do.”

“Yes.”

He laughed suddenly, a cruel, controlled laugh. “A thousand bucks he wanted. A lousy thousand bucks. I was practically insulted,
you know?”

“Did you pay?”

“Told him I’d have somebody pick him up, bring him here. He said no. Smart kid. Woulda never left.”

“What happened next?”

“Some other kid in the background tells him to hang up, so he does.” Scarpetti stood up and walked to the steamed bank of
windows. “You’re lookin’ for what I’m lookin’ for, right?”

“I’m just tryin’ to keep those kids from gettin’ killed. I figure the rest isn’t my business.”

“You find what I want, you bring it here, I pay you ten grand.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Scarpetti, would I get out of here alive if I did?”

He turned, scowling through a wounded look. “You ain’t no punk kid. You got no loose mouth. You got honor. At least, that’s
what I hear. Do I hear right?”

“Yes, but I don’t know if I can make that kind of deal.”

“You think Jimmy Santini will protect you? Because if you think that’ll make any difference to me, you’re thinkin’ wrong.
I get pissed off, maybe you get kissed off. You understand? This is important business I’m attendin’ to here. I have to do
these things, or maybe I’m not around much longer.” He tried to smile, to turn warmer. “The best lawyers can only do so much,
right?”

He gestured to the goon in the blue suit and turned his back to me again, standing at the obscured window, as if he were watching
the snow fall. The interview was almost over.

“You want to live, don’t you, Lombardi?”

“Like everybody else.”

“Livin’ is hard, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“You’re not stupid. I can see that.” “I try not to be.”

“Ten thousand,” he said without turning. “You just find what I want and bring it here.”

S
uperman and Calamari Breath were waiting outside in the Plymouth, so I had the blue suit call a cab. It cost a few bucks,
but it was cheaper than a hospital bill.

The snow was deep by the time I reached home, over the tops of my shoes. I kicked them off and stuffed newspaper into the
toes to hold their shape, hung my wet socks in the bathroom, put on my most comfortable slippers, and made coffee in the kitchen.
Finally, I sank into my favorite armchair and opened Shork’s blue metal box.

It was no surprise that he’d been living well in East Flatbush. There were a dozen different files, some containing only a
single print, others multiple prints and negatives. Most of the photographs were of young women propped on an unmade bed in
front of a blank wall. The same bed in each shot. The women were naked or in their underwear; a naked man or woman next to
them. Careless bankers’ daughters,
politicians’ errant wives, young socialites who were too trusting with their escorts, whose coming-out parties offered more
drink than they could handle. A few moments of unconsciousness, a ready camera, and their honor was gone, their futures in
hock. The faces all had the same pitiable, lost look.

There were only a few male victims. I looked for Carlson among them, without luck. Maybe Shork
had
turned over everything, or maybe Carlson had told me the truth: not himself in the pictures, but someone he cared about.
I didn’t see his pal Jorgenson, either. One of the women, then?

I put the box on the top shelf of my coat closet, poured another cup of coffee and watched the snow fall outside my kitchen
window. The same snow was falling outside Alberto Scarpetti’s solarium and on the cratered street beyond Carlson’s empty house.
It was falling on the Raymond Street Jail and wherever Teddy and Chick were hiding; falling outside Liam’s window at the hospital;
falling where the sad, shamed women in Shork’s pictures lived; falling on Father Giacomo’s neighborhood prowler as he sought
shelter from another grim, inhospitable night. The snow bound them all together in Brooklyn. It bound me, also. I felt responsible
now, in a way, for every one of them.

It stopped snowing around seven o’clock, so I drove to the Kings County Hospital to see Liam. He was cheerily making up limericks
about the nurses, a sure sign of recovery. He might lose some hearing in his left ear, but the rest of him would mend. He’d
get his car repaired when he got out of the hospital and go right back to the work he loved.

I stopped at the Home Run Diner after visiting hours
were over. Lucille wasn’t around, but her brother Sam was behind the counter poaching eggs. I was glad to see him. He had
a sunnier disposition, and his coffee was potable.

Nobody in the diner was making jokes about Carlson anymore. He was already old news. The
Brooklyn Eagle
I picked up from the counter said that he was being buried on Saturday in Greenwood Cemetery. It would be a hero’s funeral,
replete with tributes, harangues against the city’s criminal element and poignant, personal reflections on the late, great
crime fighter’s career by the city fathers.

If they only knew.

To avoid another harangue from Gino, I drove back to the neighborhood and parked across from St. Margaret’s until well after
ten. The latest replacement glass was still unbroken in the church door, and absolutely nobody, suspicious or not, was on
the street. I went straight to bed when I got home.

The dream added a new twist. Teddy Mitchell and Chick Gunderson were suspended on either side of me now, and Alberto Scarpetti
had taken Arnold’s place with the two goons. The soles of his shoes were embedded with spikes. Chick let go of the bridge
first, grabbed me by the belt, and hung on. Teddy followed, clutching my leg. I couldn’t shake either of them free, and the
longer they clung, the more I felt my own hold slipping. Alberto, oppressively close, smiled and said, “This time you won’t
wake up, Lombardi,” as he spiked the back of my hand.

It was the telephone again that woke me. Three in the morning, and I knew what that meant. I stared at it and let it ring
several times before picking it up.

“Hello, Nick,” I said into the receiver. “So, who is it this
time?”

“You gettin’ psychic, Eddie?”

“Who is it?”

“Don’t get so far ahead. I got a routine to follow here. You’ll mess it up if you go anticipatin’ too much.”

“Okay, okay,” I said glumly, and waited.

“You ready?”

“I’m ready.”

“We found one of Arnold’s pals. The Mitchell kid.”

I sat erect, threw the covers aside and set my feet on the floor. “That’s great, Nick! Where is he?”

“Empty lot on Ralph Avenue, near Sutter. Under a foot of snow. Sorry, Eddie. Didn’t mean to get your hopes up. You wanna come
and look anyway?”

I didn’t answer.

“Eddie?”

“Sure, Nick. Be right over.”

The empty lot was around the corner from the building where Caroline and the Mitchells lived. Even at three-thirty on a freezing
winter morning, there was a sizable crowd outside. A half dozen uniformed cops were keeping back the curious while the forensic
crew did their work and the ambulance attendants ran their heater and waited. DeMassio was chatting with a couple of detectives
from the 73rd precinct. They were all smoking cigarettes. Between the steam of their breath and the smoke, their faces were
almost invisible.

Without moving closer, I looked at the body of Teddy Mitchell. It was face down, lying near a heap of snow-covered rubble,
the remains of a building that had once
occupied the space. The forensic crew had removed the snow cover. A large pool of frozen blood surrounded the corpse.

When DeMassio finally saw me through the cigarette haze and steam, he left the other detectives and strolled over, raising
his coat collar against the wind.

“Bullet in the back,” he said gruffly instead of a hello. “.45 caliber.”

“When’d it happen?”

“No idea, yet.”

“Anybody hear the shot?”

“This is Brownsville, Eddie. Nobody hears shots.”

“The bullet… hollow point?”

“Can’t tell until we turn him over,” DeMassio said, “but that’s a pretty big pool of blood under him. Smaller exit hole would
mean less, especially in this friggin’ cold. What’re you thinkin’, Eddie?”

“That maybe there’s more people involved in this mess than I thought.”

“Besides Scarpetti?”

“Besides Teddy, Chick, and Arnold.” I told him about Caroline, Charlotte, and Jimmy.

“I knew there’d be a woman in this,” he said without smiling. We walked back to the sidewalk.

“How come the 73rd called you?” I asked.

“They know I like to look at stiffs in freezing cold at three in the morning.”

“Just like me.”

“Just like you, Eddie.”

I was about to ask who’d discovered the body when I saw
the two hunched figures in the back of a prowl car. I had to look twice to be sure. “Excuse me a minute, Nick,” I said. I
walked past the uniformed cop guarding it and rapped on the back window. Caroline Hutchinson, dour-faced, rolled down the
glass. A petulant Charlotte sat beside her, offering a quick look of murderous contempt before turning her face away. The
cop pulled me back and Caroline rolled up the window. When I tried to keep eye contact, she turned away, too. I walked back
to DeMassio.

“Let me guess,” he said, jeering.

“That’s Caroline Hutchinson. It’s her brother Jimmy that I was tellin’ you about.”

“And the other one?”

“Her younger sister, Charlotte. What’s goin’ on, Nick?”

“One of ’em found the body is all I know,” said DeMassio, just as a uniformed cop got behind the wheel of the prowl car and
started the engine.

“Which one?”

“Beats me. Why don’t you ask at the 73rd? I’m goin’ back to bed.”

Caroline’s sad, tormented eyes met mine as the prowl car pulled away from the curb. It turned onto Sutter Avenue and headed
east, toward the 73rd precinct station.

DeMassio was driving away, too. I lingered at the edge of the empty lot before getting into my own car. The foren-sics crew
had managed to turn Teddy Mitchell’s frozen body onto its back. The front of his shirt and coat had been shot away, and the
exit hole in his chest was as large as a Softball.

For just a moment, I thought about going back to
Bensonhurst and staying there, like a monk in his monastery. But when I made the turn at Sutter Avenue, I headed east instead,
toward Caroline, the 73rd precinct station, and all the trouble I could handle.

I
waited in the car outside the 73rd until Caroline walked out alone, eyes bloodshot and teary. I honked the horn to get her
attention.

“I’m ready for that brunch now, if you are,” I said. She looked like she wanted to say no, so I put on a sour face and followed
with an admonition: “Hey, if you turn me down, I may never ask you again. You have no idea how fast my social calendar fills
up.”

Reluctantly, without a smile, she got in. “Where’s Charlotte?” I asked.

“They still have to ask her more questions.”

“So how come you’re leaving her? I thought she was your… responsibility.”

Her eyes turned sadder. “She didn’t want me with her.”

“She found the body, then?”

“Yes.”

“Coming home from one of her drunks?”

“She wasn’t drunk this time,” she said defensively.

“And?”

“That’s all I know. She was cutting through the lot and she saw him. She came inside, and I called the police.”

“And Mrs. Mitchell?”

“I told her, too. I tried to keep her inside, but she ran out and saw him lying there. It was horrible, seeing him like that.
She became hysterical, so I brought her back inside and called the doctor who lives on the next block. He gave her a sedative.”