Peril Page 15

  “What?” Labriola snapped.

  “Recognize my voice,” Caruso said lamely.

  “Your voice?” Labriola cackled. “Like you’re Marilyn Monroe, or something? Why would I recognize your voice, Vinnie?”

  “Well, I mean, we talk a lot and so—”

  “Forget it, Vinnie,” Labriola interrupted irritably. “What’s on your mind?”

  Now Caruso hardly knew what to say, all his cleverness gathering like a pool of urine at his feet. Not smart, he told himself, not smart at all.

  “Vinnie!” Labriola yelped.

  Caruso shuddered. “Uh . . . I just wanted you to know that I’m doing it.”

  “Vinnie, you think I got all fucking day to pull shit out of you? What the fuck you talking about?”

  “Them guys,” Vinnie answered, working to control the lacerating contempt Labriola made him feel for himself. “I got . . .”

  “What guys?”

  “The ones could be looking,” Caruso answered. “For Tony’s wife.”

  “What about them?”

  “I’m keeping an eye on them. Like you asked me.”

  “So?”

  “I just . . . well . . . I . . .”

  “I told you to keep an eye on them, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So, why wouldn’t you be doing it?”

  “I just—”

  “You just nothing, Vinnie,” Labriola said. “You just woke me up for fucking nothing.”

  Caruso’s head drooped forward. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  Labriola’s voice sawed into him. “The next time you call me, you better have something I want to hear.”

  “Yeah, I’ll . . .”

  A click at the other end, and the phone went dead.

  Caruso held the cold black receiver in his hand. It felt as dark and thick and lifeless as the inside of his skull, a dense, unlighted thing that only fooled him when it seemed to spark.

  ABE

  The super swung open the door and waved Abe into the room. “You caught me just in time,” he said. “I was gonna call the Salvation Army to come get the rest of this stuff.”

  Days before, Abe had gone through Lucille’s meager possessions, selecting a few mementos, leaving the rest for the super to dispose of in any way he wanted. Now he was relieved to see that the piano remained, along with a scarred kitchen table and a second table Lucille had used as a desk. “You said she was paid up till the end of the month, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I have this woman who—”

  “Gotcha,” the super said with a leering grin.

  Abe looked at him sternly. “Needs a place,” he said emphatically. He peered about the room a final time. “No creeps in the building, right?”

  The super shrugged. “There’s creeps in every building, but the ones we got here, they wouldn’t hurt nobody.”

  “Okay,” Abe said.

  On the way back to the bar, he replayed the last few minutes of his encounter with Samantha Damonte, saw again the desperation that had suddenly overtaken her. He knew that no matter what he might have done at that moment, she would have raced away, told him nothing more, simply disappeared, leaving nothing behind.

  But she had left something behind, a tiny bit of information, and he was going to use it.

  “Hello.”

  Her voice still bore the same strain he’d heard when she’d fled the bar.

  “It’s Abe,” he said. “Morgenstern.” He waited for her to respond, but she offered nothing. “You okay?”

  “Yes.” Her tone was very nearly metallic.

  “You remember telling me that you lived in a hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that singer, the one I told you about, the one who died? She had a place in the Village, not far from the bar,” Abe said. “She had a month left on her rent. So, the thing is, I thought you might want to stay there instead of where you are.” He could not interpret her continued silence, so he took a bold swing. “It would be free until the end of the month. I don’t know . . . I mean . . . what your . . . situation is . . . but staying at a hotel, that’s expensive, right?”

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked quietly.

  From her voice, he couldn’t tell if she were suspicious or mystified, felt him a threat or just an enigma.

  He wasn’t sure himself, he realized. Maybe it was that little charge he’d felt at his first look at her. Or maybe it was the strain in her eyes, the trembling in her hands, the way her voice turned icy when she’d said “Forever,” then left the bar.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s just that . . . there’s this room, and I figure, who better to have it for a few weeks than—” He stopped and tried to ease her with a quick chuckle. “Than another torch singer.”

  Another silence.

  “So, you want to take a look at it? I could meet you there, show you around a little. Tomorrow morning, maybe, before I go to the bar.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Abe gave her the address, then took a chance and said, “May I ask you a question?”

  A pause, then, “All right.”

  “Are you . . . is something—” He stopped, thought better of his question, and decided on another direction. “Whatever it is, you can beat it, Samantha.”

  He heard a soft breath through the line, though “Thank you” was all she said.

  EDDIE

  He checked the address, then the nameplates, confirmed that one was blank.

  What now?

  Nothing, Eddie decided, but wait.

  And so he sat down on a cement stoop across the street, watching as the late-afternoon pedestrians made their way down Nineteenth Street. He had never actually lived in the city, nor ever wanted to. Manhattan was not his kind of place, and the people could hardly have been more different from himself. First off, they were educated. Everyone who lived in Manhattan, he supposed, had gone to college. His cousin Patsy had done that. She’d gotten a scholarship to Columbia, then landed a big job with a law firm whose offices were on Park Avenue. At Christmas parties back home, she tried to be nice to everybody, but despite the effort, she looked as if she were in a dentist’s waiting room rather than at home with her family. You could tell she wanted to get back to Manhattan, to her smart, well-dressed friends. Because of that, the cousins usually started talking about her once she’d left. They called her stuck-up and snooty and said she should just stay in the city if she thought she was so great, so much better than the people who’d never left the old neighborhood. But Eddie had never added his voice to their condemnations. If anything, he’d felt sorry for Patsy, sorry that she’d let go of something that seemed precious, the hold of family, which was, he thought, the fortress you lived in, and which kept you safe. That was it, he thought now, that was what made him jumpy in Manhattan and eager to leave it as fast as he could. It wasn’t just that he didn’t feel at home in the city. It was that he didn’t feel safe when he was out of his own neighborhood, away from his own kind, didn’t feel that he could just be Eddie Sullivan . . . and survive.

  His gaze drifted up the building, then along the line of windows on the fifth floor, hoping to get a glimpse of the man who’d been hired to find Tony’s wife. He imagined him as a tall, thin ice pick of a man. They had a tendency to look like that in movies, but Eddie knew the guy could just as easily be short and pudgy. The thing he had to keep in mind was this guy might be dangerous, might be capable of anything. That’s what a bad man was, Eddie thought, a guy who would do anything if the money was right or he was scared not to do it, a guy who lived without a line. Eddie couldn’t fathom how such men went through their days with no sense of limits. He’d never been sure of what he wanted to be, only that he didn’t want to be that.

  It was nearly an hour later when the man finally appeared, and despite the hazy light of early evening, Eddie had no doubt that he was the one Caruso had described the night before. He was around five ten,
dressed in a black suit, and carrying a tightly wrapped umbrella. His hair was gray, and there was plenty of it, but it was the graceful way he moved down the street that pegged him for sure. This was a man who knew how to handle things, who could think his way out of a real pickle, then make all the right moves. He had that assurance, that look of being in control, or at least able to get control of any situation.

  Eddie followed at a discreet distance, watching carefully as the man continued east until he reached Fifth Avenue, where he turned south and made his way to Washington Square Park.

  There was something about the way he moved, never looking right or left, that gave Eddie the idea that this was a walk the man often made, perhaps routinely at this same hour every day. He decided that he would station himself opposite the building at the same time tomorrow, check if the man came out again, walked to wherever he was going. If so, then he’d have established at least a portion of the man’s routine, could predict, though not with absolute certainty, where he could be found at a particular moment. He knew that this wasn’t much, but at least it was something he could report to Tony, let him know that he was on the job.

  TONY

  He was on his fourth drink and nothing was getting better. If anything, he could feel his mood darkening, growing dense, with something hateful rising out of the smoky depths, the red-eyed terror of his father.

  “Hey, Tony.”

  He looked up from the glass and saw that she’d swung into the booth and was now sitting firmly opposite him.

  “You been nursing that one for a while,” she said.

  Her name was Carmen, and she worked for some guy who kept a boat in the marina, or maybe she was his girl. Anyway, she was dressed in bright colors, as always, with huge hoop rings that sparkled in the smoky light.

  “You wanna buy me a drink?” she asked.

  Tony straightened himself abruptly and pressed his back against the wooden booth. “Carmen, right?”

  The woman laughed. “As in Miranda. That woman with the fruit basket on her head.” She laughed again. “And some opera singer too.”

  Tony blinked absently. “So, what’ll you have?”

  “How about a Bloody Mary?” Carmen said.

  “Done.” Tony snapped his fingers and Lucky, the waiter, came trotting over. “Bloody Mary for the lady.”

  “Coming up, Tony,” Lucky said, then trotted away again.

  Carmen brought a long, bright-red fingernail to the corner of her right eye. “So, you out alone tonight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She lets you off the leash like that, your wife?”

  Tony nodded.

  The bright-red fingernail made a slow crawl down the side of Carmen’s face until it came to rest at her lower lip. “Not me. If I had a handsome guy like you, I’d hold tight.”

  Tony considered the options, his eyes lingering on the face before him, the dark brown eyes and black hair and slightly olive skin. Carmen wasn’t bad looking, and she would probably get a real kick out of being with him, even if for only a night. She would tell her girlfriends about it, and in the story he would be stronger and more handsome and better in bed than he really was, because Carmen Pinaldi needed to believe that the guy she was with was strong and handsome and great in the sack, because if he were less than that, then so was she. So he should just do it, he told himself, just take her back to his house or to some motel and just do it. Sara had left him, after all. So why shouldn’t he just buy Carmen another drink, chat her up for a few minutes, then whisk her away to a shadowy bedroom and huff and puff and get it done and feel the sweet revenge of having done it?

  Revenge, Tony thought. That was the problem. He would do it only for revenge, a way of getting back at Sara. And because of that it would be without pleasure, and laced with pain, and during every moment of it he would be thinking of Sara.

  He took a long draw on the cigarette, then crushed it in the square glass ashtray. “I better be going,” he said.

  Carmen looked surprised and offended and seemed to see her face in a mirror and not like what she saw. “Oh, okay,” she said coolly.

  He didn’t want to hurt her but knew he had. “Sorry,” he said quietly.

  She shrugged dryly. “You gotta go, you gotta go.”

  He rose and paid the tab and walked out of the bar and into the dark, dark night. He could hear the muffled sound of the jukebox in the bar, the equally muffled sound of the people inside, little bursts of laughter that seemed aimed at him, at his situation, at how much he’d screwed things up. He turned and walked toward his car, away from the music and the talk and the laughter until he was safely beyond all these things and stood alone in the silence, beneath a canopy of rain-gray sky. Briefly, he peered upward and in his mind painted his wife’s face in the low-slung clouds, the weight of her loss growing ever more immense, crushing him beneath it, grinding him to dust—the tiniest speck, the blindly whirling atom—becoming smaller and smaller with each passing second until at last he felt smaller than the smallest thing that ever was.

  He got into the car but couldn’t turn the key or press his foot down on the accelerator. And so he sat, frozen behind the wheel, remembering their first days together, the later wedding with its ecstatic night, the morning after, both of them famished, laughing over toast and orange juice, the long walk along the Bermuda shore, the azure water lapping at their feet, and then the parade of days that followed, all that happiness, her sparkling eyes, the smile, the way she raked her finger along his chest, the sound of her quiet sigh, all of it coming back to him in wave after shuddering wave so that later, when he’d finally turned the key, pressed the pedal, pulled away, he couldn’t recall the actual moment that he’d begun to cry.

  STARK

  He walked to the unlighted window and parted the curtains. Across the street, he saw him again, a large, awkward man in an old blue jacket, the one he’d noticed as he’d made his evening stroll to the park earlier, then again as he’d returned home, and now, past midnight, this same man sitting on the stone stoop across the street, patting himself against the early-morning chill. He’d disappeared for a while, but had now returned to rest like a crouching gargoyle on the steps, then rise abruptly and pace back and forth along the deserted street.

  The man rose suddenly, turned left, walked a few paces, then wheeled around and retraced his steps, a journey repeated several times before he returned to his earlier place on the stoop and resumed his watch.

  A rank amateur, Stark thought. He’d never known anyone to blow his cover more thoroughly. Still, there was no doubt that the man had been sent to keep an eye on him. The only questions were why he’d been sent and who had sent him.

  Stark had little doubt that the answer to the second question was Mortimer’s friend, the overly discreet husband in search of his vanished wife. In the years since Marisol’s death, he had always expected a husband or lover to attempt the same dark plan, hire him to find a woman he intended to kill. The only surprise was the sudden rage he felt at the prospect of it being done again. It was raw and biting, as if all the passing years had done nothing to quell the fury he’d felt so long ago. He recalled the morning he’d arrived at Marisol’s apartment, the door slightly ajar, the way he’d called her name, waited through the following silence, then eased open the door and stepped inside. The carnage that greeted him still burned in his mind, Marisol’s naked body slumped in a chair, ankles and wrists bound, her hair swept over the top of her head. He’d lifted her head to see a face beaten beyond recognition.

  Stark’s dream of vengeance had flared up from that bruised and battered face, the brown eyes swollen shut, the fractured jaw and split lips. And now this rage swept over him again as his eyes bore down upon the figure on the stoop. He imagined the missing wife in the guise of Marisol, tender and forgiving, kind beyond any man’s deserving, full of the leaping energy of life, wanting only to begin again, the man in the blue jacket like Lockridge, hired to follow him until he found her, then deliver her
to Henderson, the man who wanted her dead, Mortimer’s shadowy friend.

  Of course, he couldn’t know if the two cases were exact parallels. He couldn’t know if the man in the blue jacket was the husband Mortimer had spoken of or whether he’d been hired by the husband. But in the end, it didn’t matter. One way or another, a woman was going to be hurt, and the man who paced sleeplessly on the street below was the instrument of her harm.

  Stark’s eyes focused like death rays on the man below, watching as he suddenly stopped and slumped against the leafless tree, then nudged himself away, paced, returned to slump against the rain-slicked trunk again. It was not hard to imagine the source of his restlessness, the rabid impatience that kept him in constant physical agitation. Lockridge, the man who’d followed him to Marisol, had been afflicted with the same frantic movements, and because of that Stark knew precisely what he was thinking, that he was close, very close to the hapless woman whose destruction he sought. They all plotted the same horrors, these men. And only other men, cold, brutal, vengeful men like themselves save for their targets, could stay their hands.

  ABE

  He sat at the bar, his feet planted on the rail, his fingers knotted around the half-empty pilsner. The room was silent, the piano covered, all the lights out save the few small ones that burned all night even when he wasn’t in the place. He wondered how many nights he’d spent this way, sitting alone after the place had closed, staring at his own face in the mirror across the bar. That was the thing about being alone, it numbed you after a while, so that you really didn’t notice just how alone you were. Then suddenly, someone showed up, and she had a certain look and spoke a certain way, and you realized how much you’d lost.

  What he had not imagined was the sheer, heart-stopping excitement he felt in the simple thought of her. The moment she came into his mind, all the old songs made sense again. He felt their tingle and their fever, and the strange exquisite jeopardy they conveyed. He wanted to put his foot down, get a grip, but he knew he couldn’t, not with this one. He wanted to believe that she was just a woman, like others, just a woman passing through his life. But each time he tried to do that, he remembered some little thing about her, and all his will went flying out the window, and he knew that she was not at all like any other woman he’d ever met.