Lullaby Town (1992) (14 page)

"A woman named Ellen Lang did him. I was just along for the ride."

"They after you?"

"No. This is something else."

"Whatever you want, it's yours, you know that"

"Sure."

"Whatever I've got, whatever I can get for you or for Joe, it's yours."

"I'm coming in tomorrow morning. From Chelam, Connecticut."

"Come in after the traffic, say about ten. Take you an hour. I'll meet you downstairs in front of the building at eleven-thirty."

"All right."

He gave me the address and we hung up.

The next morning I retraced the route I had driven before, this time turning off the West Side Highway on Twelfth and picking up Bleecker at Abingdon Square and following it down through the Village to Barrow.

Two black men and a very old Boston terrier were standing in front of a redbrick building at the east end of Barrow by Fourth Street. One of the men was younger and tall and muscular in a plain navy suitw ith a white button-collared shirt. The other was in his early sixties in a dark brown leather trench coat and had maybe looked like the younger guy a couple of lifetimes ago, before twenty-two years with the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau and two 9mm high-velocity parabellums in the liver had taken it away from him. Roland George. The little black and white Boston terrier sat at his feet, rear legs stuck out at odd angles, its pushed-in, once-black face white with gray, staring at nothing through eyes heavy with cataracts. Its tongue was purple and didn't fit in its mouth. It drooled. Roland's dog, Maxie.

Eleven years ago, Roland George and his wife, Liana, had been driving up the Rahway Turnpike from a weekend at the Jersey shore when a dark brown Mercury had pulled up alongside them and two Puerto Rican hitters had cut loose with a couple of Sig automatics, payback from a Colombian dope dealer whom Roland had busted. Roland survived the bullets and the subsequent crash, but Liana did not. Maxie had been left in the care of a neighbor. They had had no children. Roland George took a forced medical retirement, drank heavily for a year, then sobered up to write thick, violent novels about New York cops tracking down psychopathic killers. The first two didn't sell, but the last three had ridden the New York Times bestseller list to a couple of penthouse apartments, a twenty-eight-room home on a lake in Vermont, and substantial contributions to political candidates favoring the death penalty. Fourteen weeks after Liana George died, the two Puerto Rican hitters held up a Taco Bell in Culver City, California, and were shot to death by a uniformed police officer named Joe Pike. That's how Joe and I knew Roland George. Roland still wore the wedding ring.

I pulled to the curb, got out, and Roland shook my hand. His grip was hard and firm, but bony. "You hungry?"

"I could eat."

"Let Thomas here put your car in the parking garage across the street. There's an Italian place we can walk to not far from here."

"Sure." I gave the younger man my keys, then leaned down and patted Maxie on his little square head. It was like petting a fire hydrant. "How ya doing, old boy?"

Maxie broke wind.

Roland shook his head and looked concerned. "He's not doing so well."

"No?"

"He's gone deaf. He's got the arthritis, he's blind as a bat, and now he can't hear. I think he sees things."

"Growing old is hell."

"I bear witness to that."

Thomas said, "Shall I pick you up at the restaurant, Mr. George?"

"That's all right, Thomas, I think we'll walk back. Be good for old Max."

"Very good, sir."

Thomas climbed into the Taurus and pulled away. I said, "I never heard anyone say Very good, sir' in real life before."

"I keep trying to break him of it, but, you know, he's working his way through Columbia Law."

Roland and I turned off Barrow onto Fourth. To get Maxie going, Roland had to lift him to his feet, then give little tugs on the leash to point him in the right direction. Maxie's tongue stuck out and a ribbon of drool trailed along the sidewalk and his back legs lurched along with a mind of their own. The arthritis.

As we walked, Roland's eyes flicked over faces ands torefronts on both sides of the street, sometimes lingering, mostly not. Still a cop. He said, "Sal DeLuca is your old-line dago. Came up as a hitter through the Luchesi mob back in the forties, and by the time that broke up, he had a big enough crew and enough power to form his own family. Sal the Rock, they call him. These dagos are big on the names."

"What are they into?"

"Gambling and loan-sharking and the labor rackets here in lower Manhattan. We're in DeLuca family territory right now."

I looked around for shadows lurking in doorways or people with tommy guns, but I didn't see any. "How can you tell?"

"Over in OCCB they got a territory map hung on the wall with New York carved up so it looks like its own little United States, here to here the DeLucas, here to here the Gambozas, here to here the Carlinos, like that. A bunch of guys called capos each have their own crew of soldiers and run their own businesses, but the capos all answer to the capo de tutti capo, the boss of the bosses."

"The godfather."

"That's it. In the DeLuca family, that's Sal. Charlie's got his own crew, and his own business, but he's still got to answer to Sal. Most of the time, the capo de tutti capo retires, he passes it on to his kid. He's lined things up so that the kid has the biggest crew, the most money, like that. Sal bought Charlie a meat-packing plant"

"I've been there."

Rollie made his hand like a gun and touched his temple. "He's a nut case. Absolutely out of control. They call him Charlie the Tuna. You see, with the names? They call him the tuna because he's put so many guys in the ocean."

Great. Just what you want to hear.

We turned off Fourth onto Sixth and started south toward Little Italy. When we were waiting for a light to change, Maxie suddenly growled and ran sideways, back legs moving faster than his front legs, drool trailing from the corners of his wide shovel mouth like wet streamers, trying to bite something that wasn't there. A couple of guys in watch caps waiting next to us traded looks and moved out of range.

Roland looked sad and said, "It's hardest when their minds go."

Maxie snapped at the air until he wore himself out and then he broke wind again and sat down. One of the guys who had moved away frowned and shook his head. I said, "Sounds like digestion problems, too."

Roland made more of the sad nod. "Yes."

When the light changed, Roland helped Maxie up and got him pointed in the right direction and we crossed.

We turned off Sixth onto Spring and went into a little place called Umberto's. A bald guy in a vest hustled up to Rollie with a lot of smiling and a lot of buon giomo and brought us to a booth across from the bar. A couple of dozen people were already eating and more than half of them were speaking Italian. Dark eyes moved with Rollie and voices lowered. The maitre d' snapped his fingers and a kid with spots on his face brought water. Maxie sat on the floor next to Rollie and panted. When the maitre d' and the kid were gone, I said, 'They don't mind the dog?"

"Max and I been eating here for years. When I was with the cops, I kept book on half the guys in this place. We nod, we smile, it's like a game we play. This place is owned by the Gamboza family."

"Here in DeLuca territory?"

Rollie sipped his water and nodded. "Used to be there were only five core families, with everybody killing everybody else over territory and business, but now there's eight, nine families and these guys all like to make like they're Lee lacocca, everybody polite, everybody doing business with everybody else as long as the other guy pays rispetto. You know rispetto?"

"You want to do business in another guy's territory, you don't just move in. You pay respect. You ask permission and you give him a piece of die action."

"Yeah. Vito Ratoulli, the guy owns this place, he's a soldier for Carlino. He pays the DeLucas six percent of his gross to do business here. Vito makes the best calamari diablo around, he treats DeLuca with respect, old Sal even comes here to eat sometimes. Works both ways. Some of DeLuca's people have businesses in Carlino territory."

The maitre d' came back and put a large white plate between us. There was a little white bowl of olive oil and basil in the center of the plate and a dozen paper-dim slices of prosciutto fanned out around it and a row of small hot rolls around the edge of the plate. The rolls were warm and slick with olive oil and little pieces of garlic. Rollie folded up a slice of the prosciutto, swirled it in the olive oil, ate half of it along with one of the litde rolls, then gave the rest to his dog. He said, "You like spicy food?"

"Yes."

Rollie told die maitre d' thatwe wanted the calamari. The maitre d' went away. I said, "What part of Italy are your people from?"

Rollie made a booming laugh. "You eat enough macaroni, you lose your taste for red beans and fat-back."

I said, "Why'd the families make peace?"

Rollie spread his hands. "Organized crime isn't just the dagos and the kikes anymore. The brothers up in Harlem used to be under the mafia's thumb, but now you got civil rights. The black man figures he can do his own crime and not have to pay the dago. You got your Crips and Bloods and they ain't just street punks anymore. You got your Jamaicans and your East Indians, and those cats come up here believing in voodoo and shit. They don't give a damn about no Sicily. You got your Cubanos and your Chinese Triads and all these little bastards from Southeast Asia. Shit." Rollie frowned and thought about it. "The families knew that if they didn't hang together, they'd be run out of business, but it ain't an easy peace. There's still plenty of bad blood. No one likes showing polite, and no one likes showing respect, and a lot of bodies were buried before the families decided how they were going to divide up the crime and the territory. Your DeLucas and your Gambozas hate each other all the way back to Sicily, but they hate the niggers and the chinks worse. You see?"

"Anybody do business with the other guys?"

"Shit."

"I want Charlie DeLuca to turn loose somebody he owns."

Rollie ate another piece of prosciutto. "Charlie the Tuna isn't a guy you can talk with."

"They never are."

Rollie smiled. "You got anything to give him?"

I shook my head.

Rollie made a little shrug. "I'll ask around. Maybe I can help you out."

"I figured I'd go talk to him, see how he feels about it. You know where I can find him?"

"Try the meat plant."

"I did. He's sorta tough to see."

"Probably ain't there most of the time, anyway. The wiseguys own these businesses, but they don't like to work. Try a place called the Figaro Social Club up on Mott Street, about eight, nine blocks from here."

"Okay."

Rollie frowned at the last piece of prosciutto, picked it up, then swirled it in the oil. 'This guy, he gets hot, he ain't so good at controlling himself. That's why he's always in trouble. That's why his daddy has to clean up after him."

"I know."

"He's a nut case, Elvis. Certifiable." He spoke slowly. "This ain't L. A."

I said, "Rollie, in L. A. we got Richard Ramirez and the Hillside Strangler."

Roland stared at me for a minute, then nodded again and ate the prosciutto. 'Yeah. I guess you do."

Maxie suddenly charged sideways, snapping and barking at something that only he could see. Roland George got the sad look again and gently reeled him in and mumbled soft things that the dog could not hear and petted him until he was calm. I thought I heard him say Liana.

After a while the little dog took a deep breath and sighed and sat at Roland's feet. He broke wind loudly. Everyone in the restaurant must have heard, but no one looked. Showing polite, I guess. Paying respect, I guess.

When the calamari came, it was excellent.

The Figaro Social Club was on Mott Street, squeezed between a shoe repair shop and a place that sold fresh ground coffee, looking sharp with one of those padded doors upholstered in red naugahyde. The naugahyde was cracked and had maybe been wiped down in 1962 but not since, and the doorstep and the gutter were littered and oily and wet. A small CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC sign was hanging on the door. I thought it all looked sort of crummy, but maybe I was just suffering from West Coast Bias. On the West Coast, big-time mobsters spent a lot of money and lived in palaces and acted like they were related to the Doheny family. Maybe on the East Coast such behavior was considered gauche. On the East Coast, the well-established mobster probably went in for the rat-hole look.

I pushed through the red door and stood in the entry for a moment, letting my eyes adjust. Charlie DeLuca and a couple of guys built like bread trucks were sitting at a bare wooden table, shoveling in pasta with some sort of red sauce. Behind them, Joey Putata and a short, muscular guy were wrestling a full beer keg onto the bar. An old guy in a white barman's bib yelled at them to go easy with the goddamned thing. In the back of the place a tall bony man with a long face and a hatchet nose was shooting pool by himself. His shoulders were unnaturally wide, as if he should have been twins but wasn't, and he was X-ray thin, with pale skin pulled tight and lean over all the bones. His hair was black and shaggy and stuck out in spikes on top, and he wore black Ray Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and black roach-killer boots with little silver tips and tight black pants and a black silk shirt buttoned at the neck. All the black made the pale skin look as white as milk.