Black Water Transit (13 page)

“Oh yes. I had a meeting in Albany. Drove up in the morning, came back late last night.”

“I see. May I ask, what kind of car do you drive, Mr. Pike?”

“A big old Benz.”

“A Six Hundred?”

“Yes. Wonderful old car. I keep it in mint condition. I never drive it in town. Just for runs upstate.”

“What color is it?”

“Navy-blue. Tan leather interior. Are you shopping?”

“Is the car here now, Mr. Pike?”

“It’s close. May I ask you why you’re so interested in my car?”

“There was an MVA—a traffic accident—yesterday. One of the vehicles involved was a navy-blue Mercedes Six Hundred.”

Pike allowed a few seconds of silence to tick away while he pretended to process the statement.

“I see. I take it the blue Benz you’re interested in didn’t stay at the scene, then? Which explains the police. Do I need a lawyer?”

“If you think you do, we have no objection,” said the woman. “But it’s not a serious matter right now. The driver of the car may have no idea he was involved in an accident. We’re just trying to eliminate the possibilities. You show on the DMV records as being an owner of a Benz Six Hundred. So we’re asking about your car. All we need to do is see it, and then we walk away. You said it was in the area?”

“Certainly is. You want to see it now?”

“If that’s not a problem.”

“Not at all,” he said, getting to his feet and crossing the room to the bedroom door. “Let me get some shoes. I’ll walk you there.”

There was a gatehouse at the street entrance to Frank’s house on Valley Mills, shaped like a turret, made of river rock, complete with a little gun-slit window. As Jack pulled the Viper up to the broad iron swing gates across the graveled drive, Carmine leaned out the window and called to the gatekeeper.

“Yo, Fabrizio. It’s me.”

A huge old man, easily six-three, in his late seventies, a face carved out of rough wooden planks, wearing a white dress shirt and baggy black trousers, shuffled out of the building, raised a hand gnarled and bent with arthritis, and showed Carmine a weary grin full of uneven yellow teeth. He leaned back into the door, fumbled a bit, fumbled some more, and on the third try managed to press a button. The iron gates ground open in a shriek of rusted metal. Carmine nodded to Jack, and he started up the long drive toward the Torinetti house. Jack turned around to look back at the old man shuffling unsteadily back into the gatehouse, looked across at Carmine.

“I know that guy, don’t I?”

Carmine shrugged.

“Yeah. That was him.”

“Fabrizio Senza? From Montreal? Fabrizio Senza, with the razor? They called him Il Barbieri?
That
Fabrizio?”

“Yeah. Papalia’s guy. He’s not doing so good.”

“Christ. No kidding. I used to see him around; he’d be coming down Ditmars, dressed like a duke, big as a tree, walk like a parade square guard, trench coat over
his shoulders, he’s smiling and talking, he was always a gentleman, and everybody’s thinking, Man, who’s he here for? Is he here for me? Carmine. He’s
old
.”

“There’s a lotta that going around. Anyway, he don’t always look like that. He’s been drinking. Somebody inna family died.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“Nobody you know. Some kind of traffic thing. Hit and run. Messy. Hey! Watch where you driving here.”

Jack looked back at the road, thinking about the old man.

“He used to be such a hard guy. Now he’s a gatekeeper.”

“He likes to be useful. He does errands, sees to the grounds, keeps the gate, like you say. Frank takes care of him now.”

Now Jack could see the glow of lights through the trees that surrounded the property, soft amber squares shining through leaded-glass windows. Music was coming from the rear of the property, and at least thirty cars, BMWs, Cadillacs, a Rolls Corniche, were parked in the circular driveway in front of Frank’s granite mansion. There were no button men hiding in the trees and no armed guards in the doorway. It was just a big suburban palace like a thousand others in the Albany area. When he got out of the Viper, Carmine stopped him by the door.

“Frank’s glad you could come, Jack. He appreciates it.”

“You have any idea why he needed to see me tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Carmine shrugged, raised his arms in a gesture that strained his suit jacket and took Jack all the way back to Astoria Boulevard.

“He’ll tell you. You take care now.”

The double doors were opened and Frank Torinetti was standing in the light when Jack got to the top of the stairs. He stepped out onto the landing and took Jack’s hand, pumped it twice, holding Jack’s forearm with his left hand like a campaigning politician.

“Jeez, you’re like steel, Jack. When you gonna fall apart?”

Jack looked at his friend in the archway light. Frank’s heavy tan wasn’t hiding the effects of his chemotherapy. The whites of his eyes were yellowed, and his deeply creased face looked as if it were melting. His grin was pulled to the left, as if he’d had a mild stroke. Frank had once been a very big man, but his prostate cancer had worn him down like a pillar of salt in a slow rain. His hair was so thin you could see the dome of his skull through it. His hand was bumpy and knotted, and the bones felt very breakable to Jack.

Frank was a year younger than Jack, a kid from his own street, a friend for forty years. He felt a rush of shame and regret.

“Frank. How are you?”

Frank showed his teeth. His breath smelled of mints and cigars and whiskey.

“Hah! I’m the walking fucking dead! I got a pecker feels like a sock a wet sand. I can’t pee without pills. Last time I had a usable hard-on, I can’t remember. But hey, other than that, I’m fucking great. Come in, I got a bunch of the old people here, from the block.”

Frank pulled him into the main hall of the house and walked him through the Gothic rooms toward a broad sunroom. Out on the terrace, about fifty people were standing around the pool talking way too loud and listening to nobody.

Frank made a point of introducing Jack to a series of half-remembered faces and repeating their names often
enough for Jack to pull out the right memory. They worked their way through the crowd until they got to the gray stone pool house at the back of the property. Frank’s wife, Claire, was sitting by the pool, barefoot, in a silk blouse and a short skirt, talking to a red-haired woman in a black string bikini, when she saw Jack coming up with Frank still holding him by the arm. She got up and glided over.

“Jack … so good of you to come … this is wonderful.”

She leaned forward, her unlined face as cold and hard as a diamond facet, her neck shining blue-green in the glow from the pool light, her eyes china-blue and a little too bright. She kissed him on both cheeks while she held his hands in hers. Her skin was warm and dry and she smelled of spice and scotch. She was triumphantly without a bra, and her pink silk blouse was three buttons short of decency. Jack tried not to look at her nipples and failed. She stepped back, still holding on to his hands, while Frank watched them both.

When Jack looked at him again, Frank arranged his face into a grimace that passed for a smile, and invited him to sit down beside him. Claire said something about getting drinks and moved off into the crowd, laughing and touching people as she passed. Having a hell of a time. Jack watched her working the crowd.

She was Frank’s fourth wife, and seventeen years younger than he was, out of an Upper East Side family whose money had blown away in the Savings-and-Loan firestorm. Frank had saved her from a life of genteel poverty, and she dedicated the rest of her life to making him pay for it. The last time Jack had been at the house, Frank was just going into the hospital for the first of several rounds of chemotherapy. Carmine had driven Frank to the clinic. The big house was empty except for Claire, who had answered Jack’s buzz through the intercom at
the gatehouse. When he reached the main door, she was waiting for him with two gin-and-tonics, wearing a long gauze robe, pure white, standing in the light under the big stone archway. The door behind her was open and light was spilling out, making her glow like a Chinese lantern. Under the robe she was naked, had nothing on but a pair of silver high heels. Jack did not take this as a personal compliment. He knew her by then. If he’d been the Verizon guy, she’d have skipped the robe.

Jack had never mentioned this to Frank, but he had stayed for the drinks. Maybe Frank knew about it. Maybe not. It had only happened once, but Jack was ashamed of it almost every other day. That was the real reason he had fallen away from Frank.

They never talked about these things. Most guys wouldn’t mention that they boinked an old school buddy’s wife either. But it was the one thing Jack had done that he was always deeply ashamed of. And that included what he had done in the war.

Anyway, they both watched her walk away, and Jack said nothing about her, and Frank let him. They talked about the old places and the new people until the crowd began to bubble like a punch bowl full of champagne. The music was so loud it bordered on actual pain. Jack had his cell phone on and checked it every few minutes. After a while, they were alone in a corner of the playground, which was what Jack had expected. The pool crowd was getting louder and Frank’s face as he gazed out at them was hard and cold-looking. He saw Jack watching him, and raised a glass of whiskey toward them.

“My good and true friends.
Salud!
That guy there, in the lime-green shirt and the Dockers, looks like Brad Pitt? He’s a broker, made fifteen million last year. He’s fucking Claire, I think, only I ain’t bothered to check anymore. I figure, I can’t do it for her, long as she don’t
make me look bad, what do I care? But him? How he made his money? There’s this company. They’re totally fucked up, on the edge of bankruptcy. Brad here talks the owners into going public. So the shares start out at fifteen bucks. The owners rake in a hundred and fifty million on the offering. Last week, shares were going at ninety-one cents on the dollar. The owners sold out long time back, they keep their money in the Isle of Man. That mutt’s take was fifteen million. Around town, he’s considered a sharp businessman. He’s on the Albany Arts Board, golfs with the governor. Me, the fucking guinea mobster, I can’t get a ticket to a Variety Club bun fight. Why? I’m unsavory. Fuck is that?”

Jack listened to this carefully. When Frank stopped, breathing hard, he waited a few seconds while they both watched the crowd getting louder. It seemed to Jack they were about twenty minutes from pushing each other into the pool and a half hour from throwing up in the flower beds along the back wall.

Frank was quiet for a while. Jack watched his chest rise and fall under the flowered shirt. His breathing was ragged and sounded in his throat like a kettle on the boil. Frank pulled at his whiskey and made a face while he worked it down his throat.

“Fucking chemo,” he said, grunting. “Sick alla time, can’t hold nothing down. You had that thing yet?”

“What thing?”

Frank made a gesture, shoved his hand in the air.

“That scope thing? Check you out, up the pipe there?”

“No.”

“Any plans to?”

“No.”

Frank smacked the tabletop and glasses flew up clattering.

“Fucking right! Worst thing I coulda done. The docs
fell all over themselves making me worse. Ask me, I coulda gone for years, I don’t even know I got a prostate. Now I got more people interested in my ass than I got working on the street. Never let them do it to you, my friend. It’s a fucking con.”

“I won’t.”

“Good.”

Frank gave him a sidelong look, up from under. Jack saw the old button man under the ruined face, a glitter of bared steel.

“I hear you’re making a move with your pension fund.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s Creek saying about it?”

“Creek’s mostly retired.”

“Not putting any heat on you, go with one firm or another?”

Jack was hearing something under the words.

“Why should he? I don’t think he gives a damn.”

“Creek’s a busy guy these days. We see a lot of him.”

“Who’s we?”

“Somma my guys. Around town. The clubs. The nice cars. The broads. He’s selling cars, you hear?”

Jack had not. Frank saw the blank look.

“Yeah. Classics. I’m buying a fifty-six T-bird from him. Turquoise. White roof. Gonna give it to Claire.”

“Where’s he getting them?”

“Auburn. The classic shows. He buys and then sells. I told you, he needs the money. Doing good at it too. He makes friends.”

“Creek’s a social guy.”

“Yeah. He was here tonight, matter a fact.”

“Creek was here?”

“Yeah … he dropped by with the keys to the Thunderbird. It was him said I should call you.”

“Yeah? Where’s he now?”

“Got a call from some broad. Had to bail. Took my check for the T-bird. Bummed a coupla bottles a Perrier-Jouët from Carmine, splits in that snazzy Corvette.”

“He couldn’t wait?”

“Had a date. Creek’s always been a guy for the broads. You know he has a name for his pecker?”

Jack did. It was Steve and the Twins. It bothered Jack that Creek was seeing Frank after telling him not to have any contact. Now he was selling classic cars to Frank’s dealership. Creek was part of the company too. If Galitzine Sheng and Munro got antsy about a Mafia connection through either partner, it could blow the pension project. Creek’s own words. What was with this guy?

“Creek just dropped off the keys? His own idea?”

“Nah. Carmine called him, asked him to come over. I got some concerns. About you. I wanted to ask him a coupla things.”

“Like what?”

“I’m just interested. I’m a friend. Also, I got business concerns. You employ a lot of my people. I hear you doing things about the pension fund. Your workers there, they’re counting on you. The Teamsters are still watching. We gotta think of our people.”

“I do think of them. That’s why I’m making moves with the pension fund. How did you hear about it?”