"Some woman came in and dragged him out of here one time?"

  "And told me to leave off. I tried to tell her I wasn't trying anything on, but she was out of here with him before I got a chance. Good-looking she was. Very classy. But you know what?"

  "What?"

  "I thought she was too hard for Teddy."

  THIRTY-THREE

  When I go to the flat on a Hundred and Fifth and Avenue F, I can hardly find a place to park.

  There's big black limousines and fancy sports cars and four wheelers and all kinds of automobiles and pickups all up and down the street.

  There's all kinds of people, all dressed up, the women in black dresses, the men with black bands on their sleeves. Kids're running up and down the block with mothers yelling at them to stay clean. There's such a crowd on the short flight of stairs leading to the porch and on the porch itself that I can hardly get through. But the people make way for a newcomer. They see the red hair and the Irish kisser and they treat the stranger coming to honor the old woman—who, even though she never had a kid of her own, was like the grandmother of this huge extended family—with respect.

  In the hallway somebody's pulled out a table so people can pile their coats on it.

  I step into the living room, which is a pretty good-sized room, the way they used to be in these old flats before we got better off and found out we had to live in a lot less because land and labor for building apartments and houses wasn't cheap anymore. The old lady's in her coffin set on a homemade bier in the window bay.

  There's lot of women in black, all ages, and a lot of men, mostly on in years, except for this one group standing there in their twelve hundred dollar suits and two hundred dollar sunglasses.

  Also I see Ginger and Finks sitting in folding chairs on either side of Vito Vellitri, who's got a place of honor down front.

  I go up to the coffin and kneel down on the prayer stool and say a prayer for the old woman. When I get up and turn around, Vellitri's on his feet, looking at me, and Ginger and Finks is standing there, too. I walk up to him and say how sorry I am.

  "Is that why you came, Jimmy, or is there another reason?"

  "I'd like to talk," I say, glancing around, telling him we're too public.

  "So, come with me," he says. Ginger and Finks start to fall in behind, but Vellitri say, "No, no. There's no need for you to come. Make yourself useful. See if Shira needs you for anything."

  I follow him down the hall toward the bedroom. Before we go inside the room, I can see Shira at the kitchen table with some other women putting out cold cuts and salads. She looks up and sees me. I nod my head, telling her I'm there to pay my respects. Then she glances at Vellitri and goes back to what she's doing.

  Inside the bedroom, Vellitri sits down on the satin bedspread. It's just like the one my mother—God rest her soul—used to be so proud of. There's a Sacred Heart of Jesus with some palm woven into a cross on top of it on one wall and a picture of the Madonna and Child on another.

  Vellitri motions toward the stool in front of the dressing table and I sit down.

  "I can't prove it, Vito," I say, getting right to it, "but I got every reason to believe that Theobald Tramontina was murdered."

  He stares at me, then slowly blinks his eyes and nods his head.

  "You know?" I say. "Yes."

  "You going to let it go at that?"

  He puts his hand into the breast pocket of his jacket and takes out the photographs—or ones just like them—which we took from P. Pig's locker.

  "Are they the photographs that—" I start to say.

  "The same ones," he says. "The police have no more use for them. Or these."

  He reaches into his side pocket and takes out four silver coins, Italian lire.

  "You see this man, this well-dressed man with his dogs?" Vellitri say. "This man was Salvatore Tramontina, the grandfather. Not my grandfather, you understand. I came into the family through marriage but he was the si masto. You would say sir master."

  "The head of the family," I say.

  "More like chief," Vellitri say. "And this woman? This is Feliciana Tramontina, the sister who never married. The sister who cared for everyone after Salvatore was gone. That woman lying in her coffin in there."

  He holds up his hand with the four coins in it and says, "There are five lire missing."

  I take the silver coin out of my pocket and add it to the others in his hand.

  "Do you know what these are?"

  "Lire. Thirty lire. Thirty pieces of silver."

  "You're Irish and you're Catholic, so you know the significance of thirty pieces of silver."

  "That's what Judas got paid for betraying Christ."

  "These were given to Thbald by Salvatore Tramontina when Theobald made his confirmation. It's a custom brought from southern Italy. It's to remind the young man never to betray. Never to betray Jesus Christ, his family, or a loved one. Theobald carried the pictures and the coins with him everywhere. They were his pride. They were a comfort to him."

  I thought of him walking around in the wee hours of the morning, keeping the Amicos awake. I thought of Theobald up there in the practically empty flat night after night. I thought how the pictures and the lire hadn't been much comfort to him.

  "You know why he left home, don't you, Vito?" I say. "You know about the Black Hand letters?"

  "I know that there have been extortion attempts."

  "You know who wrote the letters?"

  "I have an idea."

  "You know who played the go-between?"

  He raises his eyebrows, surprised that I know about the way the extortion was played out.

  "I'll find out, sooner or later."

  "Then you don't have an idea yet who killed Theobald?"

  He makes a gesture toward the door, the flat, the living room, the dead woman laying in her coffin.

  "When I told you it was the end to it, I meant it was the end. I don't know what made Theobald run away from home and do such foolish things. That girl he said was his girlfriend? Maybe he wanted money to spend on her. Perhaps that was the reason. It was such a dangerous thing to do. A man like him. But Nonna grieved for him. She feared for what might happen to him after she was called to God. What she did was perhaps a bad thing to do but she meant it as an act of mercy."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The woman who raised the orphan wanted him with her."

  I finally get it. It's like we're talking about two different people but I don't know it until just now.

  "You trying to tell me the old woman killed the per son she cared for and protected since he was a kid?"

  "I'm sure she thought there was no other way to protect him except to take him with her."

  "How'd she get the heart medicine into him?"

  "Theobald had called her in the night. He was lonely and told her where he was staying. She took a taxicab and went to see him. His eyes were red from the contact lenses he wore. She gave him a bottle of eye drops."

  "How'd she know it would kill him?"

  "Her doctor had warned her to be very careful with the drug. He wanted her not to keep it in the medicine cabinet with other things for fear someone would mistake them for nose drops or eye drops and have a fatal accident."

  "She tell anybody else about this?"

  "Only me."

  Maybe it's the best story he can come up with on the spur of the moment, but it's pretty bad.

  "That's a story I wouldn't want to have to sell to a cop," I say.

  "I already sold it to a cop," he says. "Have you got a different story?"

  "I think in a big family like your wife's family that comes from the old country and scatters across a city, some of them end up being rich—one way or another—some of them do all right, and some of them end up being the poor relatives. I got a feeling that the Cardellos ended up that way. Not starving but still the poor relatives."

  He gives me half a nod, which coming from Vellitri is a big yes.

  I tell him how I think Shira got the idea to make some fast money, some big money. The whole trick with the Black Hand was that the extortionist never came right out and exposed hisself. The payoff was put into a 'friend's' hand. Shira used poor Theobald for a cat's paw. She played on his vanity. She got him to play the game and write the letters in case somebody came looking for the blackmailer with blood in their eye. No matter what happened, she was just a young woman doing a favor for a relative, delivering a message and accepting an envelope that could've been the return of a loan for all she knew.

  "She's got a sense of humor, Shira has. She's got a sense of the ironical and she wanted a little get-back from the rich relatives," I say. "So she went after some of them and they didn't let it rest. They were connected and people went looking. So she decided to shut down the operation."

  Another half a nod and a blink.

  "Theobald got the drug into him by using eye drops," I say. "It was Shira gave them to him. She was shutting down the operation and she decided to shut Theobald down, too, just to be on the safe side."

  "You got proof of what you say?" Vellitri asks, and I know right there he's been looking for Theobald's killer. And he's been looking around for the Black Hand extortionist, too, which was why Shira closed it down.

  "Marilyn LaFrance told me about the night when Shira came looking for Theobald down at the Club Morocco, but when I told her and Nonna about me finding the flat he was staying in, she acted like it was news to her."

  Vellitri stands up.

  There's a knock on the door.

  "What is it?" Vellitri asks.

  The door opens and Shira comes halfway in.

  "Some of the family's leaving and want to say good bye to you," she says.

  "This is family business, Mr. Flannery," Vellitri says, being very formal with Shira in the room. "I'll take care of it."

  "I don't know if I can let you do that, Mr. Vellitri," I say.

  Shira's looking at first one of us and then the other. She's got a good idea of what we're talking about. I can tell she's afraid.

  "I know what kind of man you are," Vellitri says. "You're a man who knows how to cut a corner and bend a rule. You understand that there's the law and then there's justice. You've even taken it into your own hands now and then. Do I have to remind you?"

  "But I ain't never executed anybody."

  "Neither will I, Mr. Flannery," Vellitri says. "Neither will I."

  He walks over to Shira and puts his hand on her shoulder. "Let's go say good-bye to the family," he says. She closes her eyes. All the color's gone from her face. Her lipstick looks like a smear of blood on her mouth. She goes down the hall with her cousin by marriage, once removed.

  I have an idea what's going to happen to her. She'll live. They'll find her a place in one of their homes where she'll play the part of the maiden aunt, a servant to those she tried to do an injury. She won't be wearing those tailored slacks and high heels anymore. The children will call her aunt and she'll never marry because if she'd known how to live separated from the family in the first place, she'd never have had to do what she thought she had to do in order to get what she thought she had coming to her. If she asked, maybe they'd let her become a nun, but that wasn't done as much as it used to be anymore.

  Then again, maybe not. Maybe she'll go to another city and make herself a life. Maybe she'll turn out to be the CEO of some big company. Maybe she'll show up on television. Who knows? These are different times. When I stop down to the police station and share these thoughts with Pescaro, he shrugs and says, "Hey, Flannery, you and me both know there's a lot of killers walking the streets. Some of them never get caught. Some get caught and never come to trial. Some come to trial and then walk out free people after a jury acquits them for lack of evidence or the evidence is declared fruit of a poisoned tree or whatever. I don't know if there's a heaven or a hell where things get evened up, but I think if somebody kills another person like Shira Cardello killed Theobald Tramontina—if that's what really happened—they're going to be punished sooner or later, one way or another."

  He must've read the doubt on my face. Here's a funny one, I think, the skeptical, hardened, bitter cop trying to tell the everything's-coming-up-roses, cock-eyed optimist that things work out for the best, one way or another.

  "Then again, maybe not," Pescaro goes on. "Either way, it ain't up to me or you. We did what we could for Tramontina. Now somebody else's going to have to take it the rest of the way because there's nothing else you and me can do.

  "The way it happens sometimes, Jimmy," Pescaro says. "An ambitious person like this woman gets away with it once, she tries it again and the next time she don't get away with it. The next time we nail her."

  That don't make me feel any better. It just makes me sad to think that the only thing we come up with after all these thousands of years of struggling with crime is that sooner or later we can maybe get the chance to hurt somebody who hurt somebody else. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth ain't the most satisfying windup in the world.

  So I go home and trudge up the six flights of stairs to my flat, feeling like I'm only a year or two younger than the old lady in her coffin. When I open the door, Alfie comes running up to greet me. I hear voices and laughter from the living room.

  Mary, my old man, Aunt Sada, and Mary's mother Charlotte, are sitting in there having a good time.

  "That ain't champagne you're drinking, is it, Mary?" I say before I even say hello.

  "Just a sip in celebration," she says.

  "Celebration of what?" I say.

  "The engagement of my mother and your father," she says. Everybody starts laughing at the expression on my face.

  Later on when they've gone home, I tell Mary I always thought that if my father decided to get married again, it'd be to Aunt Sada.

  "I mean they was always joking and fighting with each other. Your mother just sat there, quiet as a mouse, taking it all in."

  "Your mother was a quiet woman, too," Mary says. "Mike told me about her."

  "That's right, she was," I say. "God bless her."

  THIRTY-FOUR

  So Mary and me are back on the routine, which most people would call a mess.

  Mondays, I'm at the storefront listening to complaints and requests, doing what I can do for the people in the Twenty-seventh. Mary's in the other office seeing pregnant girls and women.

  Tuesdays, I'm over at the Paradise doing the leg lifts.

  Wednesdays, Mary's at the clinic over to Mary Thompson Hospital.

  Thursdays, I'm huffing and puffing again.

  Fridays, Mary's over to the clinic again.

  Saturday afternoons, I'm at Brennan's talking to my precinct captains. Evenings, I'm at the Paradise again, punishing myself.

  Which gives Mary and me Sundays together, during most of which the phone's ringing off the hook with people needing this or that.

  Mary's getting bigger and bigger.

  I'm getting skinnier but it makes me feel weak and I'm hungry all the time.

  A few weeks go by. I'm thinking about how I'm starting to feel like a burnt-out match. I'm thinking about giving half of it up, quitting the party organization, quitting the exercise classes, quitting all the running around and doing for people. I'm thinking about putting my feet up and just getting fat.

  "What are you brooding about, James?" Mary asks one Sunday afternoon.

  I unload all my gripes on her.

  "I think you're absolutely right," she says.

  "How's that?" I say, very much surprised because I was expecting an argument or at least a little friendly persuasion.

  "It's crazy for us to eat ourselves up the way we do. When all's said and done, how much do we really accomplish?"

  "Well . . ." I say.

  "I mean we've got government agencies that are supposed to take care of these problems and concerns."

  "Well . . . " I say.

  "We pay our taxes. We pay the salaries of policemen and firemen and social workers and—"

  "Well, I can tell you, Mary, there ain't enough of them. There ain't enough of any city employees, no matter what people might think. There just ain't enough bodies to go around and take care of everything that needs taking care of."

  "Hire more people," she says.

  "Well, it ain't only hiring more people. It's the enthusiasm you got to have. The dedication. Like nowadays every time there's a budget crunch with the schools, they take something nice away from the kids. Like music or art classes. Like this or that. When I was a kid, the teachers stayed after school—no pay—just to give the kids that something extra, you know what I mean?"

  "Can't expect people to work for nothing, James," she says.

  "What about satisfaction? What about giving something back? What about . . ."

  I stop right there. I know what she's doing to me. She's pulling Mike's old trick where he steals your arguments and turns them around on you.

  "There are things that need doing and there aren't enough people doing them, James," she says, being very quiet. "If not us, then who? If not now, then when?"

  "Maybe that's it," I say. "Maybe there's so much that needs doing and so few people doing it, that I can't see the end of the road. Like with these young women—these kids—coming to the storefront on Monday nights. They're children themselves and they're going to be having babies. So you get them through the deliveries okay—more or less okay—so what comes after? The simple basic things they ain't got and can't afford. I'm telling you, Mary, I can't see the end of the road."

  "There isn't any end to it, James. You know that. We're not trying to get any particular place so we can stop doing and stop being. We're on the journey and ain't we lucky . . ."

  I'm surprised, she hardly ever says "ain't" and used to correct me about it all the time until she gave up on my grammar.

  ". . . ain't we lucky we've got each other?" she says. "Most of these girls haven't got someone of their own like we've got."

 

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