Nick's Trip (32 page)

I leaned on the door. “That day in the market, when we went at it.”

“I remember. What about it?”

“I called you a name that day. I want to apologize for that.”

Caruso relaxed, letting the boyishness ease into his face. He looked then like the kid he was, dressed for the P.G. County prom. “Forget about it,” he said.

I shook his hand and walked away. Caruso yelled, “Hey, Stefano,” and I turned. “That shit you pulled on me that day, with your hands—where’d you learn it?”

I smiled. “From my doctor.”

Caruso smiled back, showing his beaver teeth. “I thought doctors were supposed to help people, not hurt ’em.”

“Take care of yourself,” I said, and walked across the grass, through the thin branches of a willow to the concrete walkway, where I stood beside Louis DiGeordano.

“Let’s walk,” DiGeordano said. “Shall we?”

DiGeordano put his hand on the two-tiered rail that ran
along the channel, and began to move. I walked beside him, taking a last pull off my smoke.

He was wearing a gray lamb’s-wool overcoat with a black scarf over a suit and tie, and a matching felt fedora. The brim of the fedora was turned down, with a slight crease running back to front in the crown. A small red feather was in the band, the same shade of red as the handkerchief folded in the breast pocket of his suit. A liquid wave of silver hair flowed under the hat, swept back behind his ears.

DiGeordano smoothed the black scarf down across his suit and pulled together the collars of the overcoat, against the wind. “Those two in the parking lot,” he said. “You see them?”

“Yes.”

“Titsunes,
” he said. “Drugs, guns, and
titsunes
. That’s what this park is now. That’s what this whole city is.”

“I don’t know. I come down here in the summer, ride my bike down here quite a bit. I see a little of that. But what I mostly see is families having picnics, getting out of the heat. Old men fishing, couples holding each other, sitting under the trees.”

“It’s not like it was.”

“It’s exactly like it was. It’s people, enjoying their city.”

DiGeordano looked across the channel and shook his hand in the air as he walked, the wag of his fingers meant for me. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, Nicky,” he said. “You’re not old enough to remember.”

“I guess not,” I said, deferring to his age, though in one sense he was right. We lived in the same city, but a million miles apart.

He put his hand back in his side pocket, his brown eyes squinting now in the wind. “We always walked this side of the park, in the old days, every Sunday. The Potomac side, looking toward Virginia; it gets too much wind, and too much spray from the chop.”

“You said you were with me and my grandfather the first day I came down here.”

DiGeordano’s pink lips turned to a smile beneath his gray mustache. “Yes. This was very early in the sixties, you were maybe five years old. Nick had bought a cheap fishing pole for you and baited it with a bloodworm. You were holding the pole—he was holding it, really, standing over your shoulder—and a perch hit the line. Nick yanked it from the channel and removed the hook, and this little perch, it was no bigger than the palm of your hand, it flipped off the walkway and back into the channel.” DiGeordano laughed deeply. “You were wearing a pair of denim overalls with a red flannel shirt underneath, and I’ll never forget you chasing after that fish, trying to scoot under the railing. Nick grabbed you by the straps of your overalls and pulled you back—he laughed the rest of the day about it, talked about it at our card games, how you tried to go in after that fish. He talked about it for years.”

I stopped walking and put my hand on his arm. “I need your help, Mr. DiGeordano.”

He looked me in the eyes, shrugged, and made a salutatory motion with his hand. “Anything.”

We walked on. A low, thick cloud passed beneath the sun. Its slow shadow crossed the channel in our direction. “Do you remember a murder last year, a young white man in his apartment on Sixteenth Street, a reporter for a small newspaper in town?”

DiGeordano withdrew a lozenge from his overcoat pocket, unwrapped it, and popped the lozenge into his mouth. He clucked his tongue, staring ahead. “Yes, I remember it. It was in the papers, every day. Then nothing.”

“That young man was a friend of mine,” I said.

“Go on.”

“He was researching a story on a pizza place called the Olde World and a man named Bonanno at the time that he was killed. I think the people that run the Olde World have an arson business and gambling operation as well, and I think my friend was murdered because he got too close.”

“Bonanno’s a filthy pig,” DiGeordano said.

“You know him?”

“Of course.”

I stopped and struck a match, cupping one hand around it, lighting another cigarette. Then I blew out the first sulfurous hit and ran a hand through my tangled, uncombed hair. DiGeordano leaned his back against the rail and looked at my unshaven face. “You’re deep into this,” he said, “aren’t you?”

I took a fresh drag off the smoke. “Bonanno’s a fat man, bushy gray sideburns, right?”—DiGeordano nodded—“and there’s two more with him, a guy named Frank and a tall man with bad skin. Who else?”

“No one else,” he said tiredly. “Bonanno and Frank are small-time hoods out of Jersey. The tall man goes by the name of Solanis. Contract mechanic, from Miami. They say he killed a cop and drifted north. Caught some buckshot in the face while he was drifting. Bad business, that—killing cops, and outsiders—it isn’t done. Very sloppy. They’re not going to last.”

“What are they into? Organized gambling?”

DiGeordano chuckled. “Not too organized, from what I hear. As far as bookmaking goes, they don’t know shit from apple butter. They still work from chits, for Christ’s sake, and notebooks.”

“So what’s their game? Arson?”

“Their game?”

“They moved their shops near a string of pizza parlors called the Pie Shack, and every one of the Pie Shacks got burned out. That can’t be a coincidence.”

“It’s not,” he said. “But arson’s not their source of income. Neither is gambling.”

“What is, then?”

DiGeordano said, “Pizza.”

I dragged off my cigarette and looked out into the water. The cloud had passed, leaving the channel shiny and brilliant in the noon sun. “Tell me about it.”

“It’s simple,” he said. “The pizza business is very profitable. Bonanno moved into proven, established neighborhoods and burned out the competition. Solanis was there to make sure there weren’t any belches. The guy who owned the Pie Shack simply left town, and felt lucky to leave alive. Bonanno puts a couple hundred thousand in nontaxable income in his pocket every year. The gambling is their kick, and the business end of it just covers their losses. No drugs, prostitution, nothing like that—just a bunch of hoods, selling pizzas.”

“What about the law, the fire people?”

DiGeordano shrugged. “Bought.”

I flipped the remainder of my cigarette out into the channel. “A cop by the name of Goloria, and his partner, a woman named Wallace, they paid me a visit a while back.”

“Goloria,” DiGeordano said.

“That’s right. Things got rough—he said it was about April Goodrich, but something wasn’t right. Is Goloria connected to your son Joey?”

“No. My ties with the law in this town go farther back, and higher than that. We don’t have to get down in the shit with cops like him. He tried to approach us, once. I sent him on his way.”

“He’s been talking to people I know about the young reporter’s murder.”

“That’s not a surprise—I would think he’d be a little nervous that you’re looking into it.”

“Why’s that?”

DiGeordano ran his fingers along the brim of his hat. “Goloria’s in with Bonanno.”

I leaned on the railing and looked down into the gray channel. A dead catfish floated on the surface, near a large sheet of packaging paper. I felt feverish and dizzy in the cold wind, and I unfastened the top buttons of my overcoat as I turned to DiGeordano. “Who killed the reporter?” I said.

“You should have talked to me from the beginning,” he said. “There’s still very little going on in this town that gets by
me. I know you disapprove of me, and my son. I can only tell you that in all my years, I never shed any innocent blood, in anything I did. In fact, there was very little violence at all. That’s why I can’t stomach what’s happened to this city. People like Bonanno—they’re vampires, but fragile as dust. Their own ignorance exterminates them. Do you understand?”

“Who killed the reporter?” I said again. The wind whistled through our silence, and water slapped the concrete.

“The knife job,” DiGeordano said. “That’s the signature of Solanis.”

“That’s what I needed to know.”

“Before you act on this,” he said, “you’d better think things over.”

“I’m fine,” I said. The cold wind stung my face.

DiGeordano studied me. “There’s something else?”

I nodded. “There’s one more piece of business.”

“You’re talking about my son’s problem, with April Goodrich.” DiGeordano waved his hand slowly in front of his face. “Like I said, nothing gets by me. You found the girl, and she’s dead. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes. But there’s more to it.”

“Such as?”

“Have Caruso pull the Caddy next to my Dart,” I said, pushing away from the rail. “I’ve got something to show you.”

I WORKED EARLY SHIFT
at the Spot for the next four days. At the end of each shift I changed clothes, drove out to Gallatin in Northeast, and parked my car in front of the row of brick colonials. Then I walked into the woods and waited for them to arrive at the Sears bungalow, and on each of the four nights, they showed with the pillowcases filled with gambling chits, at roughly the same time. Occasionally there were visitors, interchangeable ruddy-faced men in dark clothing who drove through the woods in Buick Electras and Pontiac Bonnevilles and stayed for a few
quick, stiff drinks. But always at the end of the night there were the three of them—Bonanno, Frank, and Solanis.

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT,
a Wednesday, I returned to my apartment, poured a drink, phoned Dan Boyle, and told him everything I knew.

ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON BOYLE
walked into the Spot with a gym bag in his hand and took a seat at the bar. He put the bag at his feet, ordered a draught, and asked for it in an icy mug.

“What’s in the bag, Boyle?” I said as I wiped down the bar.

“You’ll find out soon enough.” Boyle put a Marlboro to his lips and pointed a thick finger past my shoulder. “This beer’s gettin’ lonesome,” he said. “How ’bout a hit of that Jack?”

B
OYLE DRANK SLOWLY AND
silently through happy hour. Buddy, Bubba, and Richard sat at the far end of the bar and drained a pitcher, their shoulders touching. Melvin Jeffers sang ballads softly through two gin martinis before walking out with a cheerful wave, and Happy knocked back several Manhattans as he dented a deck of Chesterfields. Ramon and Darnell stood in the kitchen, Ramon demonstrating his proficiency with a switchblade knife. I leaned against the call rack, my arms folded across my chest, moving occasionally to empty an ashtray or fill a pitcher. John Hiatt’s
Bring the Family
played through the house speakers.

By eight o’clock, Buddy, Bubba, and Richard were gone. Buddy had sneered on his way out, doing his Tasmanian-devil-with-stretch-marks walk, and Bubba had followed, scratching his head. Happy had fallen asleep at the bar, a half-inch of hot Chesterfield wedged between his yellowed fingers. I phoned
him a cab and walked him outside, and put the cab on his weekly tab.

When I returned, Boyle had gone to the head. I retrieved two bottles of Bud from the cooler and buried them in the ice chest. Darnell was in the kitchen placing dishes in the soak sink, his back to Ramon. Ramon touched his knife to Darnell’s back and pushed on the blade. Darnell turned with a balled fist. Ramon laughed and pursed his lips in a kiss, but stepped back. I poked my head in and asked them to keep an eye on the bar while I shot down to the basement for some beer.

The Spot’s dirt-floored basement was long and dusty and lit by a single naked bulb. I went down a narrow set of wooden stairs and walked through powdered poison. Rat tracks were etched in the powder, and the smell of death hovered in the room like a heat. I set up two cases of Bud and a case of Heineken on top of that and got under all of them, lifting with my knees. By the time I reached the top of the stairs and reentered the bar, a line of sweat had formed across my forehead.

Boyle was back on his stool, his hand around a mug of fresh draught. A Marlboro burned in the ashtray, next to the draught. I set the beer at the foot of the cooler and locked the front door.

I returned to the cooler and pulled out all the cold Buds and Heinekens. Then I ripped open the cardboard cases and stocked the warm beer on the bottom of the cooler, placing the cold beer back on top. I slid the cooler lid to the left, closing it. Boyle asked for another shot of Jack. I poured it, replaced the bottle on the shelf, walked back down to the deck, and slipped in Winter Hours’ EP,
Wait till the Morning
. The rumble of “Hyacinth Girl” came forward.