Sweetheart (7 page)

“I promise. You tell Anthony I swear. Okay?”

“Sure.” Scandura fitted his glasses back onto his face. “Now get out of here.”

• • •

Rita O’Dea descended the stairs bound in a big robe, her face moist and bright from her bath. She called out for Alvaro and found him in the kitchen, where he had made himself a fruit drink in the blender and was pouring it into a tall glass. Her gaze narrowed in on him. “Who was that you were talking to on the phone?”

“It was nobody,” he said. “It was somebody asking if we wanted to buy a bunch of light bulbs for handicapped people. I told them we’ve got plenty of light bulbs, more than we can use.”

“Don’t give me that crap. Who was it?”

The drink he had made for himself contained banana, pineapple, nutmeg, vanilla syrup, and skim milk. He took a long taste of it and said, “Delicious.”

She said, “Was it from Miami? Was it a woman?”

“One woman at a time, Rita. That’s my rule.”

“That’s a good rule. You break it, I’ll break you.”

“Hey,” Alvaro said with a handsome smile, “you’re forgetting something. I love you.”

“Yeah, I love you too,” she said with no change of expression on her face. “C’mere and give me a kiss.”

• • •

Inside one of the lusher residences on Key Biscayne, Anthony Gardella sat in air-conditioned comfort and sipped coffee brewed from choice blends. The host was Sal Nardozza, his contemporary and a cousin twice or thrice removed. Perched open on a marble table was a black-and-chrome briefcase overstacked with money, fifties and hundreds, half to be washed through a Miami bank and half to broker a cocaine transaction, the clients Cuban and Colombian. Earlier a third man had slipped quietly into the room to count the bills so that later there would be no misunderstanding. He had also shown Gardella a balance sheet, which Gardella had perused with the trained eye of an accountant and then returned without comment.

Now that their business was done, Nardozza lit a cheroot and sat back in his wicker chair. He was dressed casually, Florida-style, his shirt open to the silver floss on his chest. His voice was raspy. “I’m surprised you came down here yourself, but I’m glad you did. You’re staying for dinner, I hope. I’ll give you a good feed.”

Gardella shook his head. “My wife’s waiting for me at the hotel.”

“Have her join us, why not? I had a wife like you got, I’d never leave her alone.”

“We got reservations at a little place. Second honeymoon for us.”

Nardozza grinned respectfully. “You’re a lucky guy, Anthony.”

Gardella put his coffee cup down with care, centering it in the saucer. “There’s a Cuban calls himself Alvaro, used to dish out towels at the Sonesta. Check him out for me, will you?”

“No problem. Anything else?”

“How’s my brother-in-law doing?”

“Ty? I guess he’s doing okay. I don’t hear nothing bad about him. He’s tied tight with that spic Miguel, but I guess you know that.”

“Yes,” Gardella said, “I know that. What I don’t know is what Miguel wants with him.”

“You want me to check on that too?”

“No,” Gardella said. “My brother-in-law’s got a big mouth. He was up to something, you’d have heard.”

Nardozza assumed a sober expression. “I never asked, but how did Rita ever get hooked up with him?”

“Like she meets all her guys, Sal. She’s a lonely woman.”

“She dropped fifty pounds, she’d be beautiful.”

“Seventy-five’s more like it.”

“She’s still beautiful. She was growing up I had a crush on her, you remember?”

“I remember.”

“You give her my best, Anthony.”

“I will,” Gardella said, rising.

He rode back to his hotel in the car he had rented, Ralph Roselli at the wheel. Ralph Roselli carried two concealed handguns, one under his arm and the other inside his waistband. The weapons were also rented, from the same fellow who had given them the keys to the car. Ralph stayed in the lobby, and Gardella rode the elevator to the fifteenth floor. The door to his room was open, and Jane Gardella was waiting for him, vivid, chic, eye-filling, dressed to the nines. “We’re late,” she said.

“They’ll hold the table,” he told her. “Let me look at you.”

She turned one way and then another and said, “Do you approve?” The question was unnecessary.

He said, “You make me feel ten times more important than I am.”

They held hands in the elevator. When they stepped into the lobby, she saw Ralph and stopped short. “Tony, do we have to bring him with us?”

“Yes,” Gardella said remotely. “For some funny reason I don’t feel right down here.”

• • •

From his room at the Howard Johnson’s, Christopher Wade punched out the private number of Russell Thurston. It was past midnight. After Wade identified himself, Thurston said, “I don’t mind you calling me at home, but not at this hour. I hope it’s important.”

“You’ve got pull inside the state police. I mean, you’ve shown that, right? Who’s it with, the commissioner himself? Old FBI man.”

“What do you want, Wade?”

“Back in Greenwood there’s a trooper named Denton — big, lumbering kid — who should be promoted to corporal. Deserves it. Why don’t we see he gets it?”

“Did I hear you right?”

“It’s a legitimate request.”

“The hell it is.”

“It’s important to the kid, and I owe him.”

Thurston sighed with annoyance. “What you’re asking is petty. It doesn’t make you look good, and it doesn’t make me look good, laying something like that on the commissioner.”

“Are you telling me you can’t do it?”

“Sure I can do it, but I’m not going to.”

“Do it, Thurston. Make me happy.”

Thurston was quiet for a moment. “I hope you’re not going to make this a habit.”

“You have my word.” Wade cleared his throat. “As long as I’ve got you on the line, let me ask you something. Should I keep a list of my expenses or just give you a round figure each week?”

“Each month. Yes, you list them. Wade, you trying to get my ass?”

“Yes,” Wade said. “I find it a challenge. See you.”

“Wait a minute.” There was the sound of Thurston shifting the receiver from one hand to the other. “I might as well tell you something I was saving for later. A rumble one of my people picked up, might not be anything to it.”

“Go ahead,” Wade said. “I’m all ears.”

“There may be a contract on Gardella.”

Wade pressed a finger to his lips and then slowly let it fall away. “They’ll never hit him,” he said.

Thurston said, “I’m betting on it.”

A
GENT BLUE
lived with his wife on the Cambridge Street side of Beacon Hill, a mere three-minute walk to the Kennedy Building. Massachusetts General Hospital, where his wife worked, was a minute closer. At the breakfast table he dawdled over his coffee, and she leafed through the
Globe
. Her eye passed over a half-column mug shot of a man and then swept back to the name under it. Pushing the paper to Blue, she said, “Isn’t this the guy you were telling me about?”

The photo was of Lieutenant Christopher Wade, accompanied by a brief report of his reassignment from the detective division at the Lee barracks to the Suffolk County office of the district attorney, where “the twenty-year veteran of the state police will take up the duties of a special investigator, particularly in the area of organized crime.”

Blue said, “I pity the bastard. Thurston will chew him up.”

His wife took the paper back and studied the picture. “Not a bad face. I like the eyes.”

Blue said, “Be better if they were in the back of his head.”

“You going to help him?”

“I don’t know if he’s worth it.”

• • •

The same report caught the notice of a mildly good-looking man at the offices of Benson Tours in Wellesley. He carried the newspaper into Susan Wade’s office and, with a vaguely apologetic air, waited until she got off the phone. Then, folding the paper to the article, he slid it across her desk. “Did you know about this?”

“Yes,” she admitted, dropping back in her chair. He hovered.

“What does it mean to us?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

He brightened and, stepping around the desk, thrust forward a long Yankee face with comfortable creases. He prided himself on a devotion to the finer things in life, intelligent and attractive women being among them. “What’s your schedule?” he asked, pronouncing “schedule” in the British way.

“If you’re asking if I’m free for lunch, the answer’s yes.”

• • •

Anthony Gardella and Victor Scandura were also interested in the announcement of Christopher Wade’s reassignment. They were seated in the rear room of Gardella’s real estate office on Hanover Street, a block down from St. Leonard’s Church. Gardella read the item twice, the second time aloud to Scandura, who said, “I’m not all that surprised. The time I saw him he hinted he was working something. He must’ve known this was coming.”

“Yet he did me a favor.”

“In a way we did him one. We got rid of two crazies for him.”

Gardella was quiet for a moment. “Two ways to figure him. He’s a regular guy. Or he’s cute. What do you think?”

“I’m like you, Anthony. I always think the worst and work from there.”

There were two leather chairs in the room, and Gardella was in the larger one. On a side table was a bag of Italian cookies bought fresh that morning from the bakery next door. Gardella ate one. “You don’t like him.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“This new job of his, Victor, it could mean heat for us.”

“What can he do to us? Nothing.”

“He can come on strong, or he can do it easy. I’d rather have him do it easy, wouldn’t you? What do we know about him?”

“He’s got wife trouble, I know that. He was in one of our joints bleeding on one of the hookers.”

“Let’s check on it, see if it’s true,” Gardella said, interested. “Wrong woman can mess up a guy.”

Scandura nodded. He was once married to a woman who allowed him his pleasure only on Fridays. Now he no longer felt the need. He crossed his legs, extending a shoe foxed along the sides and perforated on the toe. He said, “You’ve been quiet since you got back from Miami. Anything wrong?”

“I don’t know.” Gardella was pensive. “I got bad feelings down there. My cousin Sal. I think he wants to make a move. I could be wrong, since I got nothing staring me in the face that says I’m right.”

Scandura said ominously, “You’re seldom wrong, Anthony.”

“I’ll tell you what it was,” Gardella said, reaching for another cookie. “Remember when my sister turned sixteen, and Sal, my age, had a hard-on for her?”

“I remember you telling me about it.”

“I was so mad I was going to clip him. Anyway, there we are sitting in his house in Biscayne, and he mentions how he used to like her. Can you imagine? He reminds me of it, like he’s not scared anymore.”

“Maybe he forgot you were going to clip him over it.”

“No. A guy
never
forgets something like that.”

“That’s true,” Scandura agreed.

“Nose around, Victor. I need to know.”

• • •

Christopher Wade’s new apartment was on the third floor of a venerable brick building on Commonwealth Avenue. It had a kitchenette, a bedroom, a good-sized bathroom, and an extra-large sitting room that opened onto a small balcony overlooking the tree-lined mall. The weather was mild, almost springlike, and Wade, perched on the balcony, imagined the trees exploding into leaf and birds winging to the balcony for the feed he’d provide, though the thought came to him that he’d only attract pigeons. When he stepped back into the sitting room he heard the person in the apartment above walk across the floor.

He checked the telephone to see whether it was working. Boston University was in the vicinity, and he considered calling his daughters on the remote possibility of reaching one of them for lunch. Both lived in the same dormitory, Warren Towers, though in different rooms. He tried the older daughter’s number, no response, and then the younger daughter’s, same result. In his mind’s eye he tended to see them still as little girls in braids, which was the reason he was always jolted when they appeared in person as willowy young women with hard touches of sophistication, the older one majoring in child psychology, the younger in journalism. The telephone shrilled as he drifted away from it.

He wheeled around fast and snatched it up, wondering if they had divined his wishes and even his unlisted number.

Russell Thurston said, “Hello, Sweetheart. Let’s meet.”

They met north of Boston at a rest stop on Route 93. Thurston climbed out of a nondescript Dodge and slipped into Wade’s five-year-old Chevy Camaro, his small conceit, purchased at the time he promised both daughters he’d teach them to drive but never did. Thurston gave him a lingering look.

“Why the long face?”

Wade said, “Let’s get on with it.”

“Sure,” Thurston said easily. “First of all, I want to make certain you know what Gardella’s into besides the gambling, sharking, prostitution, and pornography. He’s into state contracts with that development company of his, and he’s into chemical waste disposal. Every time it rains he poisons half of New Hampshire, running trucks up there to leak on the roads. He’s into — ”

“Thurston, I know what he’s into.”

“Hear me out, because you don’t know half what you think you do. Lately he’s been doing a lot of business in Miami. He and his cousin Sal Nardozza have been bankrolling drug deals, no personal risk, only financial, and they make sure they never get burnt. The profits, I understand, have been fantastic. He and Nardozza used to work with some middleman named Miguel, but they squeezed him out.” Thurston suddenly snapped his fingers, for Wade did not seem alert. “You with me?”

“I’m with you.”

“Gardella’s also washing a lot of money down there, most of it his own, some of it for friends, including politicians. He’s got his finger in everything.”

“What was that you were saying about a contract on him?”

“It could be a hundred percent horseshit, so forget it until I hear more.”

Wade gazed up through the windshield at a sky more milk than blue. “What makes you so confident Gardella will let me get close to him?”

“That’s the easy part,” Thurston said complacently. “Since you already did a favor for him, he’ll figure you want to do more, this time with your hand half out. Let him do little things for you, nothing big. And you do little things for him. Work it into something like friendship.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“I’ve got faith in you.”

“Gardella’s not stupid.”

“Neither are you.”

“He’s not going to confide in me, no matter how close I get to him.”

“Don’t be so sure of that. And even if he doesn’t, you’ve got eyes and ears.” Thurston reached inside his coat and produced a folded sheet of paper. “Here’s a list of names, politicians and businessmen Gardella’s close with and cops he gives more than just pocket money to. When this thing is over, I’m going to have all of them.”

Wade scanned the list. “Some of these names surprise me. ”

“Nothing should surprise you. Memorize them. One cop in particular I’m interested in. Scatamacchia. Know him?”

“We’ve met.”

A trailer truck swung in off the highway and rumbled past them, air brakes wheezing, the ground trembling. The driver pulled the truck to a stop some twenty yards away and hopped out of the cab. Before hustling into the woods, he gave the Camaro a curious look.

“He’s wondering what we’re doing,” Wade said with a smile. “I can imagine what he’s thinking.”

Thurston, not amused, said, “How do you like your apartment?”

“Fine.” Wade tightened his voice. “Who’s in the apartment above me?”

Thurston was impressed. “Didn’t take you long to figure that out.”

“It was easy. No carpet on the floor. Someone living there for real would’ve laid one. Who’s up there, Thurston?”

“Someone to look after you.”

“And, of course, after your interests.”

“Why not?” Thurston said in all reasonableness. When the truck driver emerged from the woods he cast another glance at the Camaro. Thurston gave him the finger.

Wade said, “You’ve made my day.”

• • •

Alvaro twitched the curtain back. From the dining room in Rita O’Dea’s house he had an unimpeded view of Anthony Gardella’s house and of the expansive backyard, where Gardella’s wife was roaming about, inspecting winter damage to shrubs, and intermittently gazing up at the mild sky. She had on a headband, a warmup jacket, and designer jeans stuffed into leather boots, all of which made her look even younger than her twenty-three years. Her hair was loose and curly. Alvaro adored blondes.

With a soft foot he made his way to a closed door and laid his ear to it. Rita O’Dea was on the phone, business, going over figures with somebody from G&B Toxic Waste Disposal. He knew she would be on the phone for a while yet, for she loved the sound of her own voice. Quietly he let himself out of the house.

Jane Gardella looked up sharply when he approached her and set herself imposingly. She was an inch taller than he, which in no way intimidated him. Rather, he put her on the defensive, his dark eyes edging over her, a smile creeping out of his neat beard, almost as if he knew more about her than he should. “We haven’t had a chance to meet,” he said slowly. “I’m Rita’s friend.”

Jane Gardella drew her elbows in, cupping them with her hands, and checked a smile. Some little warning told her to.

“Alvaro,” he said.

“What?”

“My name. That’s my first name. I got too many last names for you to remember.” He had sugar in his smile, more in his voice. “Rita said her brother had a young wife, but I didn’t know it was somebody looks like a movie star. She should’ve said, prepared me.”

She turned slightly away from him, her hair fluttering in a cool breeze, something nagging her, as if she’d seen him before, two years ago, three years ago, someone like him. “You’ll excuse me.”

“What’s your hurry?” he said, and his voice held her. It was that sudden and almost that familiar, and it frightened her for a reason she couldn’t fathom. His eyes danced. “How’d he meet someone gorgeous like you? Was it here, in Boston?”

She let her arms fall to her sides and watched his face, watched the way he moved his mouth, his teeth flashing inside the beard.

“Miami. Was it Miami?”

She looked through him, beyond him. Quietly she said, “I think you’re in trouble.”

“What?”

A shadow fell over him. He turned, but not in time to avoid Rita O’Dea’s lightning grip. She said, “You’ve got a lot of balls, Alvaro.”

He made amends many hours later, nightfall. In the master bathroom, in front of mirrors, he used oils on himself, cologne, polish. He deodorized and powdered his private places, minted his breath, and stroked his close beard until it gleamed like the pelt of the blackest animal. His eyes sparkled like the sweetest woman’s. He pattered over rugs to Rita O’Dea’s enormous bed, drew back the spread, and lay on the top blanket to wait for her, to surprise her. “You little whore,” she whispered moments later, leaning over him, gigantic in her tent dress. Parts of him received pondering glances.

“Do we need the light on, Rita?”

“Yes,” she said, “because you’re a fool and I’m a bigger one.” Eyes remaining on him, she reached up and loosened her luxurious hair, as black as his beard. The lamp was little and shadowed him nicely. “You don’t fool with my brother’s wife. You so silly you don’t know that?”

“You’re reading me wrong, Rita, always reading me wrong. Am I not supposed to talk to people?”

She did not trouble herself to reply. She removed her jewelry, then her dress, yanking it off over her head, and stood in a slip that looked like the better part of a parachute. “Aren’t you happy here?” she asked. “Don’t you like the money I put in your pocket, the credit card I let you carry around, the clothes I buy you? You really want to give all that up?”

“Come to me, Rita.”

She sat on the bed’s edge and propped an arm on the far side of him, her hair falling. He raised a hand and traced a finger over her full face. “Don’t give me any difficult decisions, Alvaro, or we both get hurt, you more than me.”

“I’ll be good.”

She said, starkly, “You’re lucky I love you.”

• • •

The first evening in his new apartment Christopher Wade listened carefully for sounds above him and heard none, which did not satisfy him that no one was up there. A few minutes later he quietly climbed the stairs and tapped lightly on the door. He waited more than a moment and tapped again. Then he tried the knob, but there was no give. He placed his mouth near the crack and said, “If you don’t open up, I’ll use my shoulder.”