Nick's Trip (9 page)

“Nicky,” he said.

“Mr. DiGeordano.”

I walked around the counter before he could stand and shook his hand. His grip was still strong, but the flesh was cool, and the bones below it felt hollow. His aging was not a shock—he was in his mideighties, after all, and I had seen him at my grandfather’s funeral—but the frailty that went with it always was. He was wearing a brown flannel shirt buttoned to the neck and over that a full white apron. The apron had yellowed in spots, and there were reddish brown smudges of blood near the hemline where he had wiped his hands. He wore black twill slacks and black oilskin work shoes with white socks, an arrangement fashionable with kids sixty-five years his junior in some of the clubs downtown.

“I wasn’t sure if this was your place,” I said. “The name I mean. When did you drop the
Di
?”

“A couple of years ago,” he said in the high rasp common in Mediterranean males his age. “Only on the sign out front. No use making it tougher on our customers to remember our name than it already is. We still get some of the old-timers, but mainly what we get is neighborhood people. Beer and cheap wine is our main seller. You can imagine.”

I nodded and then we stared at each other without speaking. His eyes were brown and wet like riverbed stones. His hair was whiter than his mustache, full and combed high and then swept back. Deep ridges ran from the corners of his eyes to the corners of his mouth. The mouth was moving a bit, though he still wasn’t talking.

“What are you doing?” I said, glancing at the table.

“Checking the beans for rocks,” he said. “There’s always a rock or two in the bag. You have to go through them by hand. A customer breaks his tooth on a rock, you got a lawsuit, you lose your business.” He shrugged.

“Is Joey in? I’d like to talk to him if he has a minute.”

“Anything I can help you with?”

“Nothing that serious,” I said.

“In the office,” he said, and made a small backward wave with the point of his index finger. Then he yelled for his son.

Joey DiGeordano stepped out momentarily. He was rubbing his hands with a towel, and he looked at me briefly before he looked over to his father. Joey wore a dark suit and a blue textured dress shirt more poly than cotton, with a plain lavender tie that was tacked to the shirt by a pearl button. He was street slender, and his hairline was identical to his father’s, and it was pompadoured identically but was black and slicked with some sort of oil-based gel. The smell of a barbershop entered the room with him.

“Yeah, Pop.”

“This is Nick Stefanos.” Joey glanced my way again, this time with more interest. “Big Nick’s grandson.”

“How ya’ doin’,” Joey said in a tone that was inching its way up the scale toward his old man’s.

“Good,” I said. “You got a couple of minutes?”

“Sure,” he said, and jerked his head just a little. “Come on back.” I could feel the old man’s appraisal as we walked by.

I followed Joey through a long storage room Metro-shelved with dry goods into a wider room that housed a metal desk and a couple of chairs. On the desk was a phone and an empty plastic in-basket and not much else. A calendar that featured a topless blonde holding a crescent wrench hung over the desk. Beyond the desk was a narrow hall containing a small bathroom and beyond that a padlocked door that opened to the alley.

A broad-shouldered lummox stained the bare wall across from the desk. He was also wearing a suit, but the suit did not hit the intended mark. His arms barely reached past his hips, his mouth was open, and his spiky haircut was some suburban hairstylist’s idea of new wave. His eyes shifted beneath heavy lids as I entered the room.

Joey motioned me into a chair upholstered in green corduroy. I folded my overcoat on the back of it before I sat. He took his seat at the desk. He removed a pencil from a mug full of
them and tapped its eraser on the edge of the metal desk. His olive skin was lightly pocked and his sideburns reached almost to the lobes of his ears. I had seen him in May’s quite often, though we had never spoken. Usually he sat with a group of aging, scotch-drinking hipsters whose conversations ran from Vegas to “broads” to Sinatra and back again, guys who were weirdly nostalgic for a time and a place that they had never known. I placed his age at about forty-eight.

“Who’s he?” I said to Joey, jerking my head slightly in the direction of the lummox.

“Bobby Caruso. You want some java?”

“Black,” I said. “Thanks.”

Joey signaled Caruso, the first time since we entered the room that he had acknowledged his presence. Caruso left but brushed my back with his heavy arm before he did it. I pulled a business card from my inside breast pocket and slid it across the desk until it touched Joey’s fingers. He read it without lifting it off the table and then tapped the eraser on the desk as he looked back my way.

“What can I do for you, Nick?”

“I’ve been hired by Bill Goodrich,” I said, “to find his wife.” I let that hang in the air and studied his cool reaction. “He thought you might be able to point me in the right direction.”

Joey chuckled and shook his head. He made a tent with his hands and didn’t say a word, and then Caruso lumbered back into the room and set a small cup of espresso on the edge of the desk nearest my elbow. I nodded by way of thanks, and in response he tried to sneer, showing me some large front teeth that would have been attractive had they belonged to an aquatic rodent. I had a sip of the bitter coffee.

Joey said evenly, “I don’t think I can help you.”

“Bill Goodrich thinks you can.” There was more silence as Joey and I stared at each other meaninglessly and without malice. Finally I said, “Let’s talk about this, Joey. Alone.”

Joey looked over my shoulder and moved only his eyes in
the direction of the doorway. I felt the heavy arm bump my back, harder this time, and then heard plodding footsteps fade. Joey used a thin gold lighter to fire up a white-filtered cigarette, then slipped the lighter into his suit pocket.

“Who’s the sweetheart?” I said.

“Bobby’s a young cousin of mine. I apologize for him. He’s very protective of me and my father. Hangs around ’cause he’s got visions of getting into ‘the business.’ Of course there is no business anymore. But I haven’t been able to convince him of that.”

“Keep him away from me,” I said.

“You said you wanted to talk,” said Joey, his dark eyes narrowing.

“Okay.” I sat back. “Goodrich thinks you were having an affair with his wife. He doesn’t seem too stoked about that, to tell you the truth. He just wants to make sure she’s all right.”

“What’s your angle?”

“No angle. It’s a job. Goodrich is paying me to locate her and that’s it. It should be very simple if we all cooperate.”

“How did you two hook up?”

“Old friends,” I said.

Joey’s eyes lingered on my wrinkled blue oxford and loosened knit tie. “I don’t make you guys as peas in a pod.”

“We were once,” I said, and killed it at that. “How about you? How did you hook up with him?”

“Your friend’s a very ambitious young man,” Joey said. “He was persistent early on, calling me every day, trying to interest me in locations for carryout shops I was thinking of opening at the time. Finally I let him drive me around to look at some spots. I could see right away he was more interested in my business than in brokering locations. I guess Goodrich bought into all that fiction they print in the newspaper.”

“It’s not all fiction.”

“No, but it
is
ancient history. The loan-sharking, the necessary arsons—they might as well have gone down a thousand
years ago. We’re involved in a little bookmaking here and there, and that’s all—college basketball, and so on.”

“So Goodrich was ambitious,” I said, filling in the common blanks. “You met his wife over dinner, and he says you gave her the eye.”

“Listen”, Joey said, “I’ll speed this up for you.” He flicked an inch of ash to the linoleum floor and leaned forward. “I not only gave her the eye, my friend, I gave her this.” Joey grabbed his crotch for emphasis and shook its contents. “All right? I gave it to her all over her beautiful body and anywhere else I damn well pleased. And all the while I had the distinct impression that your young friend was pimping his wife to me for just that purpose.”

I shook a Camel from the deck. Joey leaned over with his gold lighter and set it on fire. I blew some smoke across the room that mingled with his. He slid the lighter back into his pocket.

“How so?” I said.

“Goodrich didn’t care about that broad any more than I did, that’s how so. I could see she had no class the first night I met her, and class is something I know a thing or two about.”

I looked at the blond mechanic on the calendar and then back at him. “A thing or two at the most, maybe.” The shot glanced off him, so I plowed on. “What was your deal with Goodrich?”

“I put him on the payroll as a real estate adviser. He was paid in cash, always in cash. It’s something he asked for, and it’s something guys like him can really appreciate. After a while their high salaries just become a blur of numbers. But cash—it’s real, you can feel it in your hand, and it’s dangerous, you know what I’m saying? Let’s face it, there’s no reason to be in business for yourself unless you can steal from the IRS. He wanted a piece of it. I gave him what he wanted, and I took what I wanted from his wife.”

The comment lingered in the air like a bad odor. “Joey,” I said, “do you know where April Goodrich is?”

Joey DiGeordano barked a short laugh that turned into a cough. When he was finished coughing he wiped his eyes with a handkerchief that he drew from the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Then he studied my eyes and grinned. “Big private eye,” he said, and shook his head. “You really don’t know a damn thing, do you?”

“Educate me,” I said.

“I don’t know where April Goodrich is,” he said. “But I’ll give you ten grand if you find her and bring her to me.”

I considered that after a drag off my cigarette. “I thought you didn’t care about her.”

“I don’t. But she’s got something of mine.”

“What would that be?” I said.

Joey said, “Two hundred grand.”

I finished my espresso and had a last pull off my cigarette before crushing it on the floor. I heard Caruso’s heavy breathing in the hallway and below that the faint tick of my wristwatch.

“You going to tell me about it?”

“Why not?” he said. “Everybody in town knows I got took for a ride. I have an apartment I keep downtown. I take my friends, girlfriends there, for parties, whatever. I also keep my bankroll there. Being in the cash business has its disadvantages. One of them is you can’t use the banks.”

“April knew about it?”

“Yeah. She was at the apartment on a regular basis for quite a while, and occasionally she needed cash. I didn’t have a safe or anything, and I knew how much was there, so I figured it couldn’t do any harm to let her in on it.”

“You trusted her?”

“It wasn’t so much as trust. She was a hillbilly piece of ass—from southern Maryland, for Christ’s sake. I just didn’t think she’d pull anything like that.”

“Go on,” I said.

“She had a key to my place. One night—”

“What night was that?”

“Monday, last week. She was supposed to meet me at the apartment. She
was
there—I called her at about six o’clock. But when I got there she was gone. So was the bread.”

“How do you know she took it?”

“I
don’t
know,” he said. “Anything can go down, right? But my money’s missing, and she’s missing, and that’s what I’ve got.”

I thought things over. Bill Goodrich had said that April had disappeared a week ago Wednesday. The money was stolen on the Monday of that week. That left a day in between.

“Will you help me?” Joey said.

“I work for Goodrich,” I said, rising from my chair as I put on my overcoat. “But if I find the girl, and she has the money, you’ll get it back.”

“Fair enough,” Joey said. “But understand this. I’ve got people out looking for her. If they find her before you do, I can’t guarantee they’re going to be too gentle.”

“People like Caruso?” I said, pointing my chin to the hallway. “He couldn’t find his dick in the shower.”

“Others too. There’s a lot of people in this town, Nick, they owe me favors.”

“So long, Joey.”

“Be in touch.”

“So long.”

I turned and headed through the doorway. Caruso was off to the side, his back against the shelving. I don’t know why he decided to make a play. Maybe he didn’t like the way I talked to his boss, or maybe he just didn’t like my looks. It didn’t really matter. Guys like him always do the wrong thing, and they always keep doing it; he telegraphed his move by trying to look too casual. But casual hung on Caruso like his tight shiny suit. When I was one step away he jerked his arm up in my direction.

I grabbed the arm with my left hand and twisted it back. Then I boxed his ear with my open right hand and swung the elbow of that arm across his mouth. It sent him into the steel
shelving with a force that rocked it back and knocked cans to the floor. I bunched his shirt and got up in his fat, sweaty face. A small amount of blood seeped off his gums and pinkened his beaverlike teeth.